


A Leap into Eternity

by fallenidol_453



Series: Harbinger [2]
Category: Dark Parables (Video Games)
Genre: Don't copy to another site, Explicit Language, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, Novelization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2020-08-19 11:42:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 43,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20209165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallenidol_453/pseuds/fallenidol_453
Summary: Moira races to save the daughter of a high profile politician from the clutches of the Frog Prince. She's not sure what's creepier, though: the frogs that are everywhere she goes or the numerous shrines dedicated to five particular women.[ Sequel to A Thorny Reprieve. Novelization of my play-through of The Exiled Prince. ]





	1. Prologue Part I

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own the Dark Parables series. All rights belong to Blue Tea Games and Big Fish Games. Any mistakes to canon in here is entirely my fault.
> 
> Given that the Black Forest is an actual location in Germany and that Chancellor is a real occupation in the country, everything referenced with those two in this fanfic is fictional and only relate to the Dark Parables universe. I tried to be as vague as possible with locations, because "The Exiled Prince" did not mention them.

The volume of a coworker’s phone in the agency break room was almost too much for Moira to bear. It was blasting the same news she’d been hearing all morning: the unexplained disappearances of the German Chancellor’s daughter and her bodyguard in the Black Forest. There was pandemonium and finger pointing. Promises to find her quickly. A plea from the parents.

Moira sipped her tea and tried to mentally banish her hangover away. Family dinners with her older sister present always led her to drink far more than what was socially acceptable. At least Catherine hadn’t tried to antagonize her this time, not with their mother and younger brother keeping a close eye on them, and both siblings’ children being present.

“Miss Moira?”

There was only _one_ person in the agency who addressed her in that manner and in that special tone of voice. Moira drained the last of her tea and looked up at her manager.

“Yes?”

“Come with me.”

Those were the sweetest three words Moira had heard all morning. After disposing of her tea bag and cup, she followed Anne with a zip in her step that hadn’t been there this morning.

&

Moira hadn’t been recalled to Anne’s office since the end of her case with Briar Rose weeks ago. She looked appreciatively at the bookshelves lining the walls, stacked with most of the journals that had once littered the floor. There were still some piles of thick case files and journals, but they were discreetly tucked into the spaces between the bookcases. The walls were bare, and sunlight streamed in from outside. The room had been purged of dust, and Anne’s desk had nothing on it except a few photo frames, a keyboard and computer monitor, a mug full of pens and the odd letter opener, and a large envelope. Moira eyed the envelope but said nothing as she sat down.

Anne closed her office door and went to sit down at her desk. She cleared her throat.

“I assume you’ve heard about the disappearances that have sent everyone into a fervor.”

“Who hasn’t?” Moira replied blandly. “They’d have to live under a rock otherwise.”

“Last night, I received a call from our German colleagues,” Anne began. “The Frog Prince recently showed up on their agency’s radar, presumably at the same time the Chancellor’s daughter and her bodyguard disappeared.”

If Moira had any kind of liquid in her mouth, she would’ve spat it out by now. The disappearances had only occurred yesterday.

“That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all, Miss Moira. There are… stories, you see, of people disappearing in the Black Forest, specifically in an area the locals have dubbed The Exiled Prince Road, and some of these stories date back centuries. Someone in the German agency branch did a little digging and correlated the dates of the verifiable disappearances to the times the Frog Prince was sighted.”

“And…?” Moira pressed.

“At least eighty percent of the disappearances happened around the same time the Frog Prince was sighted, and that was from referencing the records that hadn’t been destroyed in that fire I mentioned in our last talk.”

“So, what are we dealing with? A serial killer?” Moira asked excitedly.

“I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s a possibility,” Anne replied. She cleared her throat again and passed the large envelope over to Moira. “Because you’ve worked on Briar Rose’s case and have some experience dealing with the fairy tale realm, I’m assigning this case to you. There’s no need to worry about travel details, we have already arranged that.”

Moira excitement burst like a balloon, and she couldn’t help but sigh. She could see where this was going: because she knew about the realm, she’d be exclusively assigned to cases that dealt with it. The same thing had happened with her and Ravenhearst in the Paranormal division, much to her eventual chagrin.

“Do you want to work on this case?” Anne asked. Moira jolted out of her reverie and blinked rapidly to focus. “Don’t think I didn’t hear that sigh.”

“I do! It’s just…” Moira faltered. She forced herself to take a deep breath. “What if Cara comes back from her maternity leave and wants her job back?”

“We’ve been preparing for that, which is why I’ve been careful to give you cases that don’t have you interacting with a lot of people,” Anne explained patiently. “But, it’s ultimately Cara’s decision if she wants to come back or not. The three of us _will_ work something out if it comes to that. You could become her protégé… work as a file clerk… serve as a backup agent… the possibilities are endless, Miss Moira. Unless you’d like to go back to the Paranormal division.”

“I don’t think I fancy being a file clerk… but at the same time, I don’t want to go back to Paranormal just yet.”

“Someone has to sort through all of the case files eventually,” Anne stated. She nodded at the envelope. “Open this up. There’s a few things in there that might help with the Frog Prince case.”

Moira plucked the letter opener from Anne’s pen mug and neatly ripped open the top of the envelope. Setting the opener aside, she tipped the envelope down at an angle. The first thing to slide out was the crown Briar Rose gave her. She caught it with one hand and set it down on her lap. The next was a small stack of blank sheets of paper, paperclipped together, that gave her a mild tingling sensation in her fingers the longer she held it.

“The crown I… somewhat understand, since you did say it might be a key to something. But why the papers?” she asked.

“That’s a map that came directly from the fairy tale realms. Cara brought it back with her on one of her previous cases ages ago. It will show a detailed overview of the general area you’re in once you’re inside the realm.” Anne explained. “Unfortunately, it _is_ old, and we think the magic is fading from it. I hope there’s enough magic left to give you a complete picture of what you might deal with.”

“I would’ve killed someone for a map in Briar Rose’s case, so this is very well appreciated,” Moira stated. She slid the papers back into the envelope and stuck the crown in afterward. “Before I set off, I have a request.”

“Name it.”

“While working on Briar Rose’s case, I had to carry a lot of items that couldn’t fit in my modified long coat, often for long periods of time,” Moira began. Anne nodded minutely. Surely, she understood! “True, the magic of the realm made the heavier items light as a feather and virtually indestructible until they had served their purpose… but I digress. My arms and shoulders hurt quite a bit throughout the case. For this case, may I bring an empty bag with me? I just want to have the ability to carry things around without putting myself at risk of injury.”

“How large of a bag are we talking, Miss Moira? A backpack? A gym bag?” Anne asked. She rubbed her eyes. “There are… protocols we have to follow. We don’t want agents stealing anything from wherever they go to solve cases.”

“Ideally, it’s something that can carry tools or weapons that unlock different areas. Things I can’t carry in my coat,” Moira replied. She tried to not sound pleading. “Objects that won’t threaten to stab me in the throat if I try to climb a wall and hold onto a cache of sharp things at the same time.”

Anne fell silent for a few minutes, and then she reached for her desk phone. Moira’s heart leapt into her throat as she watched her manager dial an extension and reiterate Moira’s request to whoever was on the other end of the line. There was a back and forth conversation that Moira was too anxious to focus on.

Finally, Anne ended the conversation as politely as she could and hung up the phone.

“We desperately need you to start this case right away, because the safety of the Chancellor’s daughter is paramount. However, the Director might be willing to approve on a tentative basis if you can show them the bag you have in mind by the end of today.”

The tension eased from Moira’s body, and she let out a sigh of relief.

“If I’m given permission to leave now, I can get back here with the bag in an hour. Give or take. It depends on traffic.”

Anne opened a desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper.

“Fill this out so we have a record that you left early. Once the Director has seen the bag and gives their final approval, go straight to the airport. You have a flight to Germany to catch.”


	2. Prologue Part II

It wasn’t a very nice feeling to sneeze violently and then have awful abdominal pain at the same time. Moira had barely stepped foot onto the Exiled Prince Road when it happened. Sneezing, she could deal with. But an item to find this close to the entrance to the fairy tale realm? _Already?_

Moira got down on her hands and knees in front of a fallen, hollowed out log. An overturned, brightly lit lantern limited her vision somewhat. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to find here but looking for anything that looked out of place in the forest undergrowth was probably a good start. Her first clue was a motionless frog at the bottom of a stout wooden post to her left. It was painted a bright green and carved from stone, its beady black eyes staring unseeing into the sky above.

The next piece she found was a small half circle made of polished metal sticking out of the log. Two more alike pieces were in the bushes to the left of the post. When Moira plucked a wooden lizard off a tree, it and two of the metal half-moons repaired themselves into what looked like half of some sort of emblem.

The finished product was a large metal circle on a wooden stand. Carved frogs decorated what little surface there was on the stand, while two lizards were perched on both sides of the metal circle. Moira opened her Director-approved shoulder bag and stuck it inside.

Standing up, she stepped over a fallen branch and walked up the trail through dense fog. The constant croaking of frogs and toads were the only noises she could hear this late at night aside from her footsteps in the undergrowth. After what she estimated as a fifteen-minute walk, the fog gradually began to recede, and she soon found herself at a fork in the road.

Directly where the path split stood a towering ancient tree. A rotten smell spewed forth from a huge, gaping hollow in the middle of it. To Moira’s left was a large statue of a frog, covered in what looked like moss, and lit in the shadows of a standing torch light. Further down the path, she could barely make out an old iron gate that was looked like it was covered in an impenetrable thick curtain of ivy and assorted vines.

At the base of the tree, to the right of the frog statue, was a large decorated jar with a glass domed top. Moira walked up to it and picked it up. Inside the dome was a golden frog. Where the bottom of the glass dome and the top of the wooden stand met, ice crystals jutted out at odd angles, and they didn't feel cold to the touch. Regardless, it was likely useful to take it along. Into the bag it went, with Moira trusting the realm to not break it until she found a way to use the jar.

The book caught her attention next. It was on the right side of the tree’s base, resting carelessly at an angle on some of the exposed roots. It was large but thin on pages, with a worn leather cover. The image of a crowned frog was tooled onto the front cover. At one time it may have been painted with gold leaf, but it had faded and chipped away with the passage of time. Had the Chancellor’s daughter dropped this? Moira contemplated taking it with her but left it alone. Instead, she looked down the trail ahead. It wasn’t blocked by any obstacles that she could immediately see, so she cautiously moved forward.

The trail ended at the base of a cliff. The swinging, lit lantern suspended from a tree branch was her only warning to stop walking. From here she could see a stunning view of the village she was staying at, but there was a strange haze that obscured most of the details except for brightly lit lights and some low-hanging fog. What did the villagers see when they looked up here? The cliff she was standing on? Or just more of the Black Forest’s ancient trees?

The swinging lantern made something glint in its light. Moira turned toward the tree it was hoisted on and came upon a brightly colored lock deeply embedded into it. Two empty circular slots were the only things she could see. Since she had nothing to open the lock with, she ignored it and turned around. On the other side of the trail, something else was deeply embedded into the rocks. Moira stepped over to it and crouched down.

A puzzle. Of course. The craftsmanship was exquisite: a tiny golden ship on the left side with an arrow she could spin around freely, and a silver castle on the opposite side with an identical arrow. All around the base of the puzzle were eight star-shaped handles, painted in two colors each. Judging from how there were four sets of twin handles, this had to be a matching puzzle of some sort. Between the ship and the castle, in the middle of a model of an ancient astrolabe decorated with zodiac symbols, was a three-dimensional, multi-pointed star that pulsed with a faint blue light.

Moira shifted her crouching position and began turning the arrows. They each glowed a light blue after a certain point, and then she hesitantly pushed on the star. It felt warm and alive beneath her touch, pulsing with magic. The star handles were pushed outward by the star being pushed in, and Moira had no trouble pushing the matching handles back into the mechanism that released them in the first place.

She waited. Then she heard a scraping noise and let out a small cry of alarm as the front of the puzzle with the star began to slip free from the rock. She caught just in time and let it slide off all the way, setting it aside. What she saw next was a hollowed out interior lined in some sort of dark blue fabric.

Nestled inside of that was a small hand sickle. Moira sighed. Mildly disappointed but not surprised.

“At least it’ll get me past that iron gate,” she quipped. “And then break afterwards.”

&

At the old tree, Moira examined the frog statue. The flickering torch light showed that time had not been kind to it. Not only moss, but layers of dirt and grime coated it. It was bad enough that the two slots at the statue base had been completely crusted over with grime and hard-packed dirt. Nothing short of a large, durable rag and a scrubbing would get rid of the gunk.

She stepped backward. A loud croak made her jump, and she turned at the source of the noise. A few feet in front of her, a common frog stared. Frogs… did not stare at people, especially after almost being stepped on. She took a step forward. The frog did not move.

Its eyes were almost human-like. Before Moira could contemplate them, it hopped into the closest bush.

She forced herself to take a deep breath. This was a fairy tale realm. Anything could happen here. She would _not_ think of wild stories of people being turned to frogs. Turning on her heel, she marched up to the iron gate. The swift, brutal motions of hacking away the overgrowth on the gate settled her mind for a while. Once that was cleared, and the sickle broke like expected, she was left staring at the gate’s lock.

It needed something large and circular. Moira shifted her bag around, unzipped it, and pulled out the emblem she’d assembled earlier. She held it up against the lock to determine how it’d fit. It looked the right size, with grooves on either side of the outside edge for the lizards. The base didn’t look like it would fit inside. Fitting one arm through the middle of the emblem, she used her free hand to try and see if it could be pulled off. She had glad for her new leather gloves, because it gave her a substantially better grip on the aged wood than bare hands ever could. After a few minutes of struggle, she managed to pull the base off and let it fall to the ground.

Upon sticking the emblem into the slot, the gate snapped open with a loud groan that reverberated around the area. Before she stepped through the gate, Moira took out her journal and looked at the map she’d brought. Anne had been right; it _was_ giving her an overview of the area she stood in. The crabbed handwriting on the top left of the first paper read ‘Forest’. Only half of the map was filled in; the other half would likely materialize once she walked ahead.

Map in hand, Moira closed her bag and readjusted it on her body. Then she stepped through the gate.


	3. Chapter One

A long, tree-lined path greeted her. Large rose bushes were planted between towering trees, perfuming the air with their heady scent. Two frogs were on the trail, staring at her with their humanlike eyes, but they hopped away the minute Moira stepped forward. At the end of the trail, she could barely make out the silhouette of a cottage obscured by deep fog, with bright lights shining through the windows. She took another step forward and came across a tree with a deep hole carved into it.

It was what was inside of there that drew her in and made her jaw drop.

The interior had been decorated to resemble a cathedral hall in miniature, with its own stained glass. Three ever-burning candles positioned on both sides of the hollow showcased the gold accents and colored glass. In the forefront were five deep slots that resembled a specific element: fire, air, water, what looked like earth, and… the final one, second in line, was hard to tell. Moira opened her bag and pulled out the ice-themed jar she found earlier. She placed it into the second slot and waited.

Nothing happened.

She looked closer. The jar fit perfectly into its slot, but it looked like nothing amazing was going to happen until she probably collected the other four jars. Wonderful. She grasped the jar with both hands and gave an experimental pull. The jar lifted away easily, and Moira put it back in the bag before moving forward.

The dense undergrowth gave way to a stone-lined walkway, and Moira could see the cottage more clearly. It was two stories tall and brightly lit inside and out, though curtains and boarded up windows prevented her from seeing inside. The cottage exterior was shabby and dilapidated, with boards missing from the roof and on the outside façade on the second story. A large wooden porch was lit by two lanterns placed on either side of the double front door. To the left of the cottage was a stone walkway leading to an iron gate, also lit by two lanterns on either side of it. To the right of the house was some sort of hollowed out boulder, surrounded by ivy and secured shut with a heavy iron grate with no visible keyhole or lock. Bright light spilled out between the grates.

Moira pulled out her map. The drawing had expanded like she thought it would. Now it showed not only the path she took before, but also the cottage, the gate, and the lake area beyond the gate as well. She put the map away, and then felt something watching her. With hairs standing up on the back of her neck, she looked up at the second story.

A man’s shadow obscured the light upstairs. He was too far away to see clearly; all Moira could tell was that he wore something to hide his face and body. A hooded cloak? That was all she got before he ducked out of sight and abruptly vanished.

Was that a ghost? The Frog Prince? She didn’t know. All she knew was that she’d have to be careful approaching the house. Anyone who could disappear into thin air and reappear at will wherever they wanted wasn’t to be trifled with.

As she walked up the porch steps, the cottage’s dilapidated state became even more apparent. The windows were boarded up, with some of the glass in the panes shattered. Cobwebs and ivy were rampant on the ledges and handrails and threatened the grow all over the porch. The front doors were bolted shut and had grimy but intact windows. Moira ducked out of sight of the windows and reached up to grab a red cloth hanging from a hook by the front door. It was damp and greasy on her gloves, but she put it in a coat pocket anyway.

A gold-colored Mary Jane shoe lay discarded on the mat in front of the front doors. Was it Marie’s shoe? It had to be. Moira left it where it was and shuffled over to the other side of the porch. The wood looked sturdy at a glance, but she took care to avoid wet spots. A cramp in her abdomen that she originally attested to being hunched over suddenly intensified under the window she crouched under, and she gradually managed to get into a kneeling position to peek and search.

The window had been shattered a long time ago, and it was only partially boarded up. A bright lamp prevented her from being able to look too deep inside, but she _could_ see the back end of a chair and a treasure trove of junk on the desk facing this window. The chair back would hopefully prevent her from being seen from the inside. Mindful of the sharp glass protruding out, Moira began to pick at the pile.

&

Two keys on a beaded keyring, which was attached to a pretty circular disc featuring an empty birdcage surrounded by four different colored frogs. One of these keys had to open the gate leading to the lake. Moira shuffled off the porch and went down the stairs carefully, standing up only when she was out of sight from the windows. She eventually reached the gate after tripping over a loose stone in the pathway. Dusting herself off, she inserted one of the keys into the lock and turned it.

The gate unlocked, but the key broke off in the lock and the rest of the keyring disappeared from Moira’s hand. She shook her hand free of imaginary dust and walked forward. The path to the lake was shorter than she imagined, but the view was pretty enough. A small river to her left split the area in two and bottomed out into a large deep lake. There were brightly lit lamp posts placed in uneven intervals in the area, shining on darker and deeper forest areas, the rocks littered about on the other side of the river, and on the murky lake water. Moira got that familiar cramp again the moment she stepped over the river and onto the other side. She made her way deeper into the forest, and soon came upon a small clearing.

She stood in front of one of the lamps she’d seen earlier. The base and the land around it were littered with leaves and broken tree branches. The small area was decorated with at least three statues: a large bronze frog with a huge sapphire eye, a praying angel with stained glass wings, and the rusted iron statue of a soldier. Long ago, someone had placed a stuffed stack at the lamp base, but Mother Nature had obscured it with foliage over time. What caught Moira’s attention the most was a jeweled dragonfly wing stuck to one of the trees.

Waving away the real dragonflies darting about, she started looking for more parts. One of the parts ended up being the eye of the frog, its real eye being the same dull bronze the body was made of. The finished product was a grey disc with a dragonfly inlaid with jewels and gold in the center. The dragonfly was too large for the disc it was attached to, but Moira didn’t care. She’d found her item and her stomach had stopped hurting. She put the disc in her coat pocket and walked away from the clearing.

Just before she left the lake area entirely, something in the lake made her do a double take. The object gleamed and sparkled in the lamp light, bobbing in the murky water without a care for the world. Unfortunately, it was too far for Moira to reach, and she did _not_ want to test the water’s depths. At the threshold of the gate, she pulled out her map. It was the same as before, but a large red star had appeared. She angled the map toward the lamp light to see it better. The red star was not on her location like she’d secretly hoped; it was where she had started out on the Exile Prince Road earlier. What did it mean?

She walked back to the spot indicated and inhaled sharply. An item! _That_ was what the red star indicated on the map. What would she find now, something to get the thing in the lake?

That was… precisely what she found, ten minutes later. The netting had been patched twice but it looked increasingly frayed, and it was tied to a bendy stick that looked like it was going to snap at any moment. But it was a net! She wouldn’t have to go diving in the lake after all. Moira made her way back there and scooped up the floating object. It was a ladybug disc, twin to the dragonfly one she’d found earlier. The netting finally deigned to break then and there, unable to bear the weight of the jewel-crusted disc any longer than necessary. Moira simply dropped the net onto the rocks, slipped the second disc in a coat pocket and left the lake.

&

The red cloth she’d stolen from the cottage couldn’t stand up to the task of cleaning up the entire frog statue, so Moira mostly used it to scoop out the gunk from the two holes on the bottom of the statue and scrub it clean as best as she could. She placed the two insect discs onto the slots and pushed them in. She heard a clicking noise, and the frog’s mouth opened wide. Inside was an enameled box with a large oval carved on top. Resting inside the oval was a small key.

The top of the key had a small circle on top of it. Inside the circle was a small carving of a house. Moira plucked it out of the frog’s mouth, unbuttoned her coat, and she stuck the key inside of an interior pocket that buttoned shut.

The temperature around her dropped sharply. She gasped at the chill and rebuttoned her coat, looking around her. The fog had thickened substantially in a way she could only describe as supernatural. Moira could barely see five feet in front of her, and she couldn’t see beyond the trees.

Worst of all were the frogs.

Their steady croaking had increased in volume and sounded shriller. The ones she could see on the forest floor had somehow increased in size. That didn’t bother her. What did bother her was that their eyes were huge and glowed yellow.

If she were smart and sensible, Moira would run and never look back. But she steeled her nerves and walked toward the cottage. Running away wouldn’t solve the case. Running away wouldn’t save Marie or her bodyguard. Running away would break agency protocol and set a bad example. She would solve this case or die trying.

She made it to the cottage without incident. She walked forward. A loud banging caught her attention, and she stopped to look up. On the second story, Marie pounded on the window frantically with her bound hands until someone grabbed her from behind and the upstairs lights went dark.

Before Moira could move, the fog thickened further and the same man she saw before appeared in front of the double doors. His hooded cloak was dark green. His hair was wild and long under the hood.

Moira ran toward him, intending to tackle him to the ground, and she screamed as the earth crumbled under her feet.

&

Moss and damp rock filled Moira's nostrils when she regained sense of herself. She was afraid to open her eyes out of fear of what she might see. Slowly, she removed her arms from her head and took a deep breath to focus. She had mild pain on the side that hit the ground. Nothing felt broken. Experimental movement of her feet and legs confirmed the same. She felt thick moss and grass on her ear, which likely broke her fall.

There was a steady drip of water somewhere. Moira matched her breathing to it and finally opened her eyes open. She saw faint moonlight and the semi-darkness of an underground cave and took another deep breath to steady herself. Caves could be escaped from. She could do this. She eased herself into a more comfortable sitting position after checking that she still had her bag.

She was alone. Her only company was the mostly skeletonized corpse of someone clutching a bulging burlap sack close to their chest, with a mostly lit lantern illuminating their greasy hair and open jaw. To her right was a closed iron gate with an empty rectangle shaped object to its left. North of the skeleton was a blue painted wooden chest and a rolled stack of paper. Moira crawled over to it.

The stack of paper turned out to be a tabloid newspaper, printed in English. It probably belonged to the corpse nearby. Moira couldn’t read the date very well, but the year was from the nineteen twenties at the earliest. The headline screamed, **_MYSTERIOUS PALACE, FILLED WITH IMMENSE WEALTH, RUMORED TO BE BURIED UNDER BLACK FOREST!_**

Moira glanced back at the corpse. Was that a thief? Was she _really_ trapped underneath a palace?

… No, that was impossible. She had fallen down here from in front of a run-down cottage. With a huff, she tossed the tabloid aside and dragged the chest over to her.

In the dim lighting, she saw die sides that went up to the number seven, and they could be flipped through to other numbers. There were gold numerical numbers placed between the die sides. Three skulls made up the chest opening and served as a three-way lock.

This was an exact replica of a puzzle she encountered during training: adjust the die so each pair added up to the gold numbers between them. Moira had the chest opened in no time once she could see what the gold numbers were. Inside the chest was a blue circular stone with a white rose painted on it. She pocketed it and managed to stand up.

There was a doorway up ahead that she couldn’t see earlier. Once upon a time, it had been barred shut with an iron gate, but time had rusted and broken it off. Moira walked toward it, narrowly avoiding a large pool of water that had formed between the door and the now opened chest.

The room she walked into was a dead end. Old and rotted junk was piled haphazardly around the room. Moonlight streamed in from a window, but it was too high to reach and the glass was too thick to break with anything in the cave. There was another gate, but part of the front had been obscured by rubble from a long-ago rockslide that had utterly buried the other side of the gate. The only things of note here was a white disc with a swan etched on, which Moira grabbed, and a table with an item to find, if the pain she was experiencing was any indication. The table was crowded with broken odds and ends, and jars filled up what space was left. A single lamp lit everything, barely giving her anything to see by. Bit by bit, searching for things that visually did not fit onto the cluttered scenery, she found was she sought: a handle.

… a lever handle?

There had been an empty rectangle slot in the other room. Moira went to it, pushed the handle inside the rectangle until she heard something click, and she pulled the lever down.

The gate shuddered open.

&

The door was still closed.

“Shit,” Moira muttered. She pulled out the blue rose disc she found earlier and pushed it in.

_Now_ the door opened, but she couldn’t go any further.

The cloaked man stood in her way, blocking a path that led to at least three possible exits out of the cave system. Moira took a step back as he pointed threateningly at her and began to speak.

“You are not welcome here, stranger. I do not know your intentions, but taking my key is the last mistake you’ll ever make. This is the fate of those who attempt to venture into my kingdom.”

“You kidnapped the Chancellor’s daughter!” Moira shouted back. Her hand clenched at the area where she’d stowed the key, but the man made no attempt to take it from her. “I’m here to rescue her!”

He didn’t seem to hear her. He raised his fist, and Moira almost lost her balance as the earth rumbled around her and under her feet. But it wasn’t a rockfall he was triggering. Rocks and dirt _did_ fall, but the man was summoning thick vines to cover two of the exits behind him. With a grunt of effort, he stopped and lowered his fist.

“Don’t worry, stranger,” he said softly. Moira stepped backwards on instinct; the way she came through was still clear. “Your dire predicament is nothing compared to the curse I bear every single day.”

“What curse?” Moira demanded. Fog materialized and thickened around the man. “Who are you? _Hey!_”

Her words fell on deaf ears. The man turned away and used the fog to disappear into thin air.


	4. Chapter Two

The fog eventually dissipated, but the Frog Prince escaping without answering a single question made Moira more angry than afraid. Nothing was being accomplished; she was no closer to finding out anything on this realm, Marie’s whereabouts, or the Frog Prince himself. Furthermore, she was still trapped down here. Probably permanently, if the Frog Prince had his way.

But caves could be escaped from. Even if she had to dig herself out with her bare hands.

She found an old rapier leaning against some rocks but put it back after a brief inspection. The twisted, thorny vines were as thick as her wrist in some places, and the slender rapier blade simply wouldn’t hold up to the task. She spotted a shiny silver apple laying discarded on a rock face being devoured by ivy and picked it up. It’d make a nice paperweight in another life, or a fantastic projectile. She unzipped her bag and stuffed it inside.

The only door not blocked by vines was the far left one. Moira treaded over there carefully, stepping around red spotted mushroom patches, fragile crystal formations protruding from the ground, and the vines that had formed along the cave floor. The door was a light blue color with no doorknob, and its lock was a small gold frog with its crown missing. She reached into her coat and unbuttoned another interior pocket, taking out the crown. She held it up to the indent.

A perfect fit, most likely. This room, if it was one, could contain information on the Frog Prince. If she couldn’t obtain any information on him during her investigation, then she’d come back here. She put the crown back inside her coat and walked back the way she came.

Incredibly, the vines had spawned throughout the cave. When Moira walked into the dead-end room, she found two items that hadn’t been there before: a book and a small knife. Both she grabbed, and then she opened the book. Once, it had been a diary. Time, and perhaps a few mishaps in the cave pool, had made it fat and the ink nearly illegible. She was able to find one legible entry, scrawled on a page corner, with an old photo to accompany it. The photo was a headshot of a young teenage boy, with narrow eyes and an open mouth that showed broken front teeth.

The journal entry read: _They call me insane, but I will find this hidden castle! Then no one would ever doubt the Great One!_

_Rach Neumann, the greatest thief the world has ever known._

Moira walked back to the skeleton and compared the skull to the photograph. Same hat. The teeth were thankfully still in the jaws, and the front ones matched the photograph too. Poor baby. Never got to prove his claim of being the greatest thief.

_First the tabloid, and now Rach. Both had mentioned a hidden castle, but neither offered concrete proof to their claims_, Moira thought. She took the small knife she found out and crouched down in front of Rach’s burlap sack. It was bulging with unknown items, and a seam had become frayed and ripped over the years. She sliced it open with the knife and yelped with surprise as a flood of gold coins spilled out. She stood up and almost tripped backwards on a vine, losing the knife somewhere in the dark. When the coins stopped flowing out, she picked up a random coin to investigate it.

It was a coin she’d never seen before. It was minted with an unknown royal crest, and larger and heavier than one American coin she’d seen once; the tourist who had it had said it was a half dollar. She put the coin back. Just because Rach had a sack of coins didn’t prove the hidden castle’s existence. The Frog Prince could have stashed them down here for a future emergency.

Coins weren’t the only things to fall out of the bag though. Moira picked up a piece of paper that looked like it was part of a map. Crudely sketched, it depicted the dead-end area up ahead. Rach had left a clue: there was a shovel on the table, and it could be used to dig out the dirt pile in the same room. It was probably a broken shovel, but still! A _shovel_!

Moira stuffed the page into her journal and ran toward the room.

&

Moira didn’t care the table was still cluttered. She picked up and set aside anything remotely resembling a shovel piece until she finally had a fixed one in her hands. The handle was made of good, solid wood, but the shovel head was badly rusted. Still, it would serve.

She turned her attention to the dirt pile and began digging. The shovel broke halfway through, but she didn’t care since she could see an actual tunnel opening appearing out of the dirt. She tossed the broken thing aside and continued digging by hand. When she finished, the tunnel was tall enough for maybe a toddler to walk through upright, but she would have to crawl on all fours.

She dusted herself off as best she could and pulled out the map. A very large area marked with a question mark had formed beyond the cave she was trapped in, with the small tunnel connecting the two areas. On the far-right part of the unknown area was a small blue landmark that resembled a lake.

Was this more of the forest?

She folded up the map and placed it back in her journal. She wrote a general entry of what had happened thus far (Oh _no_, the Frog Prince took me for a thief and now I must use my sleuthing skills to escape!), put the journal back, and then started crawling into the tunnel. It was narrow, but she was limber enough to navigate its twisting path. Thankfully, the rockslide had only buried the first three feet of the tunnel, and the rest of the way was relatively clear. Moonlight poured down from another entrance, highlighting a scattered debris field, and Moira was finally able to get into a kneeling position after clearing away the worst of it.

She poked her head out.

The tunnel entrance here had been made by blasting a hole in the… cobblestone path. That explained the rubble around her and her knees. Hardly any forest paths had trails made of cobblestones. She saw a fence to her left. A huge tree with rose bushes. There was… a wall, and a huge statue of a man stood on top of a gate.

This was not a forest.

Had the tabloid and Rach been telling the truth all along?

“Holy _shit_.”

&

Once her initial shock wore off, a small kernel of disappointment remained: she was still underground. But the wonders of the place before her were enough to dull the disappointment slightly. This was an actual courtyard, with greenery and paths that led toward a castle and perhaps some gardens. Magic was probably at play here, and lots of it: how else could the trees and other plant life grow down here? Even the moonlight softly shining on everything was probably artificial.

The cave walls, when she could see them, looked like they’d been carved out by hand to make room for everything here, judging from their hewn appearance. But somehow, Moira doubted that. No one could carve out this large of a cave complex, whether alone or with help. It would take centuries – and that was only a slight estimate!

She heaved herself out of the hole. To her left was the fence she spotted earlier, made of simple silver. Behind the fence was an elegantly constructed birdcage. On top of that was a large gold skull, and a massive gold chain lock prevented her from looking _too_ closely inside. There was an item in there, but that was a key for another time.

Under the giant tree was a large, cracked boulder with a sword plunged into it. Moira didn’t even try pulling it out; she’d need dynamite or a sledgehammer to even make a dent into the rock. There was a small flight of stairs leading up to a gate with the statue, but she ignored it and focused her attention on the puzzle by the boulder.

At first glance, it looked like a grave. _R.I.P 1835_ had been carved into it, yet underneath the numbers were four rectangular slots. On either side of those were two painted murals designed to look like stained glass. On top of the puzzle was a dragon and knight facing off; if Moira triggered something at _just_ the right moment, the knight would defeat the dragon and possibly give a reward. She sat down in the grass and got to work.

The wall to the left of one mural was crumbling badly. She broke it with a few light punches and found a token with the number one on it. She pushed a button to the right of the knight, causing a gold square to lift and reveal two patterned panels. Matching those gave her the number seven. Pushing the knight and dragon yielded number nine, and number two lay discarded among some flowers.

What was she supposed to do with these tiles? Moira stuck them into the slots so they read _1792_. Nothing. Swapping nine and two did nothing. Swapping nine and seven after that, however, made the grave move aside. Hidden in the revealed cache was a simple square mirror encased in a blue and gold frame. She opened her bag and stuffed it inside. Nothing bad would happen to it.

Next, she pulled out the map. The blank area had been vaguely drawn in, showing a complete layout of both inside and outside this underground palace. The red stars were back but looked faded, pulsing on two places: one beyond the Prince gate and the other to her right in the next part of the courtyard. Entering the gate might be risky considering the palace was beyond there. The Frog Prince could be waiting for her arrival and possibly turn her into a frog. She stood up and walked away from the gate, toward the next portion of the courtyard.

Upon entering the area, she expected to double over in pain because of an item to be found, but it thankfully didn’t happen. At least, not happen as badly. She knelt next to a pair of broken, twisted bird cages made from gold and began searching. What she eventually found was some sort of plant emblem, with a lightly jeweled fern leaf resting on light blue fabric. It was pretty to look at but utterly useless at this point in her investigation, and she put it in a coat pocket.

The scenery around here was just as pretty, at least. Peaceful, too. Soft grass had replaced the cobblestone paths, and carefully planted flower bushes in marble planters surrounded an oval shaped, towering fountain. Two statues, a knight and a queen, blocked the entrances to two additional paths, with hedges obscuring what lay beyond them. Overlooking this peaceful garden was a vast mausoleum made of a pale gray material that wasn’t stone but wasn’t marble either. A series of steps led to locked double doors. Painted above them was an image of a young woman with dark hair. Judging from what little Moira could see of her attire, she wouldn’t have looked out of place in a production of Swan Lake.

Was this woman an actual swan princess? What was her connection to the Frog Prince? With nothing on hand to answer either question at the moment, Moira left the garden and went back to the courtyard. She walked up to the gate and craned her head up to look at the statue. She could just barely puzzle out the message carved onto the shield the stone prince leaned against:

_TO HONOR MY BELOVED ONES_

_FOR THEY SHOW ME THE MEANING OF LIFE_

Moira bit her lip and cringed. Esoteric, yes. Could it be taken in several different ways? Absolutely. Her mind went immediately toward a sinister take on the phrase and she thought of Ravenhearst. ‘The House That Love Built’ had been built upon murder and tragedy, after all. She hoped she wouldn’t have a similar experience here.

Taking a deep breath, she stepped forward—

—and shrieked as a ghost materialized just a few feet in front of her. A woman, wearing a coronet and gown. She watched silently as Moira found her bearings. _She_ was no stranger to ghosts, but one appearing suddenly like that? It was enough to make it easy for the Frog Prince to find her, judging from how loud she screamed.

Heart still pounding, she took stock of her immediate surroundings. A greenhouse on her right. A nautical themed door to her left. The palace’s main entrance and the item Moira needed to find were located behind the ghost. Fumbling inside her coat, she took out her tape recorder. It still had enough on it to record at least an hour; Anne was always brief and punctual when it came to be explaining the case.

But would it pick up the ghost’s voice?

She pressed record and stepped forward.

“Do you need to speak with me, Your Highness?” she asked politely.

The ghost vanished. She stopped recording.

“_Fuck!_”

Okay, maybe the ghost was shy. Or she was guarding the palace from intruders while the Frog Prince was somewhere else. Moira shoved the tape recorder back in her pocket and started looking closer at what she noticed earlier. The greenhouse door was secured with chains looped around the two door handles and a padlock. The nautical door was actually a gate of some sort, similar in appearance to the one in the forest, but the five items she had to find were ships in bottles. Beyond the gate, she could barely make out the shapes of a pier and a boat.

To get inside the palace, she’d need to find some sort of shield emblem and two discs that were silver and gold. Ugh. So many items to find, so little time. She just hoped her bag was large enough to hold everything. Those element jars she was finding were taking up the most space currently.

At least the item she had to find here could be discarded easily: a royal scepter. All the jewels and enameled wood were a dead giveaway on the dark gray windowsill. When it was fixed up, Moira hefted it in her hand and went back to the queen statue. It moved aside the moment the scepter was returned, and she tentatively stepped forward.

&

A dead end. Another enormous mausoleum made of pale-yellow stone dominated the scenery, brightly lit from both within and by two hanging lanterns on either side of the door. Silver and gold pedestals were planted on either side of the pathway leading up to the mausoleum. Above the door was a carved and painted etching of a woman whose lifeless gaze made Moira’s skin crawl.

Who was this woman? Judging from the apple tree planted outside and the broken garden gnome half-hidden by a bush, it was hard to tell. Snow White, perhaps, but there were no other gnome statues around.

What next caught her attention was the piece of paper nailed to the apple tree. Moira stepped over several fallen apples to see what it said.

It was a blueprint for the palace. The date read _1580_.

…how long had the Frog Prince been alive? Did this factor into the curse he spoke of? She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know presently. She backed away and left the area.

On second thought, she should have checked the map first. The only way she could describe the pain in her abdomen was by comparing it to period cramps, except she had no pain relief and it got more intense the worse she tried to ignore it. Crawling her way to the bird cages, she constructed another elemental jar. She didn’t bother to look at what element was being represented this time and shoved it inside the bag as best she could. Another inspection of the map proved more clues had to be found: two faint red stars were visible on the lake and back deeper underground where she’d dug herself out.

If she was reading the map correctly, the lake was inside the suspected swan princess mausoleum, and that required a key to get inside. She went back down into the tunnel and crawled back to the junk room. On the table, she found what she found after it repaired itself: a key, with a strong Swan Lake theme. So, the woman on the first mausoleum _was_ a swan princess! That cleared up at least one question in her mind.

When she went back to the mausoleum, the swan key opened the door without incident. Moira stepped inside and promptly stopped in her tracks.

In her mind, a mausoleum implied a tomb. This was more of a shrine, and it set Moira’s teeth on edge. She saw a ballerina dress on a headless and limbless mannequin. An enormous rug depicting two swans covered most of the wooden floor. There were three swan-themed paintings hanging on the walls, one of which was a full body portrait of a woman wearing the same dress as the mannequin. She grabbed an oar propped up against a side table for support and went to the vanity on the mannequin’s right.

The large jewelry box on the vanity had an aquatic themed puzzle. Judging from a carved fish and the number twenty beneath it, she probably had to make sure a total of twenty fish were represented on the four small panels in front of her. She took her time on the puzzle, letting her mind empty itself of worries. When she solved it, the jewelry box turned out to be a miniature safe. Nestled inside plush black velvet was a crescent moon gem the size of her fist. Then she spotted two double doors that had missed her initial inspection of the room, and one of them needed the crescent gem she held to open.

The other required a lightning bolt gem, but she didn’t have it yet. Pity. What lay beyond those doors could be a casket with or without the body or another swan themed room.

There was another set of double doors to the left of the side table the oar was found on, and it required a familiar emblem she’d found earlier. Moira searched her coat pockets until she found the swan disc and stuck it into the lock. One of the doors opened, splitting the disc in half. When she stepped through the threshold, she stopped in her tracks with a gasp.

If the Frog Prince or whoever had built this shrine intended to convey a moonlit, tranquil lake scene straight from the Swan Lake story, they had succeeded. Moonlight shined down on the clear cave lake’s surface from a hole in the ceiling. Small lit candles lined the path up to the water. The only things missing were trees, but there was only so much you could do when replicating scenes in caves. Moira spotted a sledgehammer and grabbed it but soon found herself distracted by a statue positioned at the lake edge.

Carved from white marble and inlaid with pearls and other pale precious gems, the anonymous Swan Princess was such an exquisite piece of art that Moira almost didn’t mind she had to find an item on and around it. The statue’s arms gently extended out like wings, and her face held a passionate tenderness that would put actual statuary displayed in museums to shame. She absolutely looked ready to meet her prince here and dance under the moonlight like in the story. Moira absently tucked a bottle with a ship inside into an empty coat pocket and forced herself to walk away so she could leave and continue her investigation.

She wished she brought a camera, so she could preserve this landscape without relying on memory to conjure it imperfectly down the line. Unfortunately, she didn’t have one, and she doubt the agency would simply lend her a Polaroid camera. She’d probably smash it to pieces like she does… _did_ with the agency cars.

She pushed the disappointing thought aside and vented it out by smashing the boulder in the courtyard to smithereens. She took the sword out of the rubble and handed it to the knight statue, passing through the path he had previously blocked.

&

Just as she came upon a clearing, the same ghost from earlier materialized in front of her. Moira frantically grabbed the tape recorder and hit record. A good thing, too, because the ghost finally spoke to her. She hoped the recorder would capture the ghost’s voice!

“Detective, in your last mission you saved my beloved sister, Briar Rose. I thank you for that. I am Princess Ivy, the first love of the Frog Prince.”

Ivy curtsied. Her features were more pronounced now that she wasn’t ready to flee at a moment’s notice or cloaked in mist. Her gown had ivy accents, with some looped around her slender waist like a belt. Her hair was brown. That was all Moira noticed, because she was screaming internally. She was _right_! Briar Rose and Princess Ivy were related! She now had _proof_!

Then her brain came to a screeching halt when she processed the rest of Ivy’s greeting. _First_ love of the Frog Prince?!

“It’s—ah, a pleasure to meet you at least, Your Highness.” Moira replied. She wasn’t sure how word of her case with Briar Rose had spread here in the realms, but she was going to roll with it. Ivy was a ghost; she probably had all sorts of information. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

Without warning, Ivy raised her hand and cast an unknown spell on Moira. She barely had time to react before it hit her face, blackening her vision and forcing her to her knees. Ivy began talking then, her voice filling Moira’s mind.

She told a story.

It started basic enough: Ivy’s kiss had restored the prince from a frog's form, they got married… and dreamed of happily ever after. Moira saw it all flashing through her brain.

But something went wrong. _Was_ wrong. Ivy’s voice became soft and full of sorrow.

“Years passed. Then decades. As my hair slowly grayed, he stayed young as ever. I still remember the day he held me in his arms as I drew my final breath. And at that moment, in that state of sadness and anguish, the prince transformed back into a frog.”

Moira’s mind could not process this fast enough. The story eclipsed at a pace that made her head hurt and make her want to vomit. She tried to focus and could only focus on minute details. The Frog Prince had reddish-brown hair. His curse was to live forever. How did the two mausoleums she found factor into this?

But Ivy wasn’t done.

“He is doomed to live the cycle over and over again: kiss, transformation, lover’s death.”

Moira gasped in pain as the spell… generated the faces of four women and showed them in rapid succession. She saw a Cinderella. The Swan Princess. A Snow White. A mermaid. Now she understood. The mausoleums she’d found so far—and no doubt the one’s she’d find in the future here—were for the Frog Prince’s _wives_.

Finally, the spell ran its course, and she was able to come back to reality. Using the oar for support, Moira got to her feet. Amazingly, she was still pressing record.

“Princess… Ivy—”

“I understand you’re here to rescue the Chancellor’s daughter, but to do that the prince’s curse must first be undone,” Ivy interrupted. She tossed something to Moira, who couldn’t catch it in time and let it fall to the ground at her feet. “Take this key to the greenhouse. There you will be one step closer to finding what you need. Good luck, Detective.”

Ivy vanished. Moira had to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. There was an actual key in front of her boots. Her tape recorder was still recording. She shut it off, picked up the key, and put both away in separate coat pockets.

She’d gotten more information on the Frog Prince then she could ever dream from this one conversation. She was sympathetic to his plight, but it did not excuse his behavior during their encounters.

…hadn’t she promised herself she’d investigate that one room not blocked by vines if she found information on the prince? Ivy’s spell, whatever it had been, was muddling her brain. Perhaps she should sit here and wait until her mind cleared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dialogue spoken by Ivy is directly lifted from the game, though I removed the very first part of her spoken backstory and converted it to be part of the narration instead. It seemed like a better choice. Rach's diary entry and the statue inscription is also directly lifted from the game.


	5. Chapter Three

It took her a moment to realize she was in a completely new area. This seemed to be a place where all five of the Frog Prince’s wives could be honored. A massive stone monument dominated the scenery, outwardly resembling the exterior of a church – complete with a bell! – but with no door to enter inside. Instead, five arches had been carved into the façade, with an individual woman’s statue residing beneath them. An insignia above each one let Moira identify the wives easily: a leaf for Ivy, a swan, an apple…

The Cinderella statue made her double over. She smacked her forehead on the statue’s skirt and saw stars. Blinking rapidly to get rid of them, wiping tears of pain away, Moira got down on her hands and knees to investigate. She constructed some sort of shield emblem, roughly the size of her hand and bearing a side profile of an anonymous prince wearing a laurel crown. She stuffed it into a coat pocket and stood up to look around more, rubbing her forehead.

A gilded, circular device caught her eye next. A large box with a crowned frog inside, surrounded by five empty pillows, stood in the middle. Five empty—_shit_. Five _more_ items to collect. In front of the box was a large circle with a triangle inside it. Inside that was a very small gold circle with some sort of indent or insignia in its middle. What would happen when she put whatever it needed in there?

Hopefully not a portal opening. Portals were always bad news, and Moira hated them.

She spotted a weird green rock next. A large short sword had encased in… emerald? A very translucent emerald? Malachite? No, that mineral wasn’t _that_ green. The rock looked as fragile as glass though. Was it?

She picked up a loose stone tile from the ground, backed up, and hurled it at the green rock.

The tile shattered against the green rock. Moira shielded her eyes from the debris and then went to look at her handiwork. Stone dust and fragments from the tile littered the ground, but there wasn’t a single scratch on the green rock. Her foot bumped something at the rock’s base, and she looked down. A golden panel rested there, with two empty circular slots carved into it.

Were there more emblems to be found? Or would goblets fit in there? What about actual balls? She didn’t know what went in the slots, and frankly she didn’t care to know until it was time to break the rock. There wasn’t anything else to find here anyway. She scrawled an entry into the journal (“How can I stop an immortal prince’s curse?”) and checked the map.

Two red spots were present in the cave area. The map’s magic must be prioritizing its fading energy into creating a detailed map over showing items to find. Which was fine, Moira could just find item locations the other way: walk around until she got magically punched in the gut.

She put the map and journal away and took out the crown key. Her original thought came back to her: she’d open that door if she hadn’t gotten any information on the Frog Prince. But then she’d met Princess Ivy and got far more information on him than she’d ever dreamed of finding on her own. There wasn’t any harm in opening the door now, right?

&

Moira pushed the door open. What would she find here? A library? The Frog Prince’s study? She didn’t think he slept in here – or sleep at all, for that matter.

She stepped through the threshold and promptly had her hopes deflated.

No information on the Frog Prince here!

This was Princess Ivy’s tomb.

The room was roughly hexagonal in shape, with two walls overgrown with ivy and the rest – save one – covered in gold filigree. The only wall exempt was the one directly facing Moira: it was completely covered in ice, and some of it had started spreading onto a wall on its right. Behind the ice was a set of double doors. Were more tombs located beyond there? Who knew?

Moira walked up to the monument in the middle of the room and knelt to investigate it. A stone effigy of a woman meant to resemble Ivy rested on top of a black sarcophagus. Unfortunately, she had no way of knowing if the effigy was an accurate depiction of the princess. The princess’s ghost had been… vague, for lack of a better word, on showing her features too clearly due to the greenish-gold aura surrounding her, and her memories had flashed forward too quickly to focus on her face. Moira ran her fingers along the sarcophagus lid until they hit a plaque. Blowing imaginary dust off it, she squinted into the semi-darkness and read:

_Sister Ivy and Sister Briar Rose: Release the spirit of one and you shall free the other._

“More proof!” Moira shouted excitedly.

She grabbed her journal and ripped out a blank page out, using her pen to trace the letters from the plaque. It wasn’t as good as a charcoal rubbing, which would have been preferable, but in the event the tape recorder failed this single scrap of paper would _have_ to convince Anne that Briar Rose and Ivy were sisters.

After putting everything away, Moira stood up and saw something resting against a pillar. It was a disc with a gold tree emblazoned on it. _Very_ clearly something she’d need later, unless the Frog Prince kept it around for sentimental reasons and accidentally dropped it once upon a time. Well, no matter. Finders, keepers. She’d hang onto it for now.

She left the tomb and crawled through the tunnel to the garden. She felt nothing until she stepped into the area with the Swan Princess’s mausoleum. There was that dull ache she remembered well, but when would it hurt the worst? She tried the shrine and the shiny green rock area. She felt nothing.

The mausoleum’s interior, on the other hand, made her feel like she was being sliced open with a chainsaw slowly, and it got stronger the closer she got to the moonlit lake. She was practically crawling toward the Swan Princess statue in the end, and she grabbed one of the statue’s legs for support. The pain abated somewhat as she rested her cheek against the marble. Was there an item to be found? Absolutely. Did this pain also feel horrifying like her endometriosis? Also, yes. Except _that_ didn’t go away when she found something.

Moira started reaching for random things that didn’t looked they belonged to distract her. Two tiny swans. Broken silver and pearl jewelry. They were scattered on and around the statue, with some on the rocks of the lake surface and others in the water itself. Eventually she had a whole tiara in her hands, made of silver and embellished all over with pearls, diamonds, and a very tiny turquoise. The two swans on the crown made it very clear who the tiara belonged to – or represented.

She contemplated where to put it. She’d stuffed mostly large items in her bag, but the small tiara might get lost among them. Additionally, it was too large to fit flat or comfortably in her coat pockets. If she had the misfortune of falling from a great height once more, she didn’t want to land on her ribs. Again. She thought of the witch hat from her previous case: light as air when carried, yet it almost cracked her skull when she put it on. Surely this tiny thing didn’t follow the same rules.

She put the oar aside for a moment and pushed some of her hair behind her ears. She put the tiara on, adjusting it slightly. It wasn’t a perfect fit, being too small for her head and the ends of the tiara digging into the skin behind her ear, but it didn’t hurt her head _and_ she had a way of carrying it.

She might even look cute, if there was a nearby mirror she could admire herself in.

The next item, on the windowsill by the palace entrance, was more difficult to find. Pieces had fitted themselves into the stonework and on the statues, as well as on the wild plants growing beneath. She eventually pieced together a key for the skull cage outside. The thick bars holding the lock snapped off when she twisted the key inside, and she was able to reach inside to claim her prize: a set of bolt cutters.

Moira used those on the chain on the greenhouse door, and finally used the key Ivy had given her. Warm air spilled out when she pushed the door open, giving her a mild but welcome shock. She’d grown a little accustomed to how damp and cold it was down here!

Inside, the greenhouse was filled with exotic plants she had no name for, and none of them were labelled. It was also much larger than its exterior suggested, with two separate but locked rooms leading to other areas. Peering through the steamed glass on the west side, Moira saw that the room beyond was a tiny garden of some sort, with a bench and a small pond next to it. She tried the tree disc she found in Ivy’s tomb on the door lock, but it wouldn’t fit.

The other locked door required some sort of glass vase. The third in a set, most likely.

Dimly, she became aware of a stabbing pain in her gut, but she ignored it to look at a locked cabinet in the middle of the room. The circular indent had a fern leaf imprinted on it. Moira dug out the token she found earlier and pushed it in. The door unlocked and slid backwards. Inside was another ship bottle, which she grabbed with a huff and stuffed into her bag.

Finally, she focused her attention on the flowerbed giving her so much pain. Her knowledge of flora wasn’t the greatest, but not all the flowers planted here were exotic species, and she recognized some of them as ones her mother grew in her garden. The exotic flowers gave her mild pause. She had no way of knowing if they were poisonous or not. She reached out and swatted at some of the mystery flowers. No pollen, but no strange smells either. The sliver of exposed skin on her wrist didn’t become agitated. She wasn’t choking for air after what felt like ten minutes. Once that was evident, she carefully plunged her arms inside and started looking for her item.

She finally understood what she was looking for after cutting open a finger portion of her glove on exposed glass. Using what she found among the flowers and soil, Moira pieced together a delicate little vial with a white flower floating in pale green liquid. The flower wasn’t a white rose at first glance, but it was another one she’d seen but couldn’t get the name from the tip of her tongue. It’d probably come to her later at an inopportune moment. She put the vial in a coat pocket and left the greenhouse, making sure to grab a lightning bolt token on her way out.

&

The locked double doors in the Swan Princess mausoleum opened when the moon and lightning bolt tokens were inserted. Moira thought she’d find the woman’s tomb, but that wasn’t the case. The room in front of her was essentially an extension of the room behind her.

A large crank-operated theater took up most of the room’s space, but the hand-crank was missing. Two chairs, one of them overturned, were positioned nearby. Faded bouquets of red roses littered floor. On one wall was a massive oil painting depicting a white swan and a black swan swimming in a lake. Underneath the painting was a white dresser, its drawers forcibly removed, and their contents scattered everywhere. Moira went in for a closer look, only to realize it was mostly junk items. She turned to leave the room but couldn’t.

“Here too? For fuck’s sake. I’d rather have this than get punched in the gut.”

Judging from the large glass… thing perched on the side of the dresser, she’d eat the Swan Princess’s tiara if the item she assembled here was the vase she needed for the greenhouse. She grabbed the glass thing and other things at random until she had a completed vase, and then she went back to the greenhouse.

The vase fit perfectly in with the others, and the door slid open to reveal a hidden room. Moira ripped the tiara off her head and stuck one end of it in her mouth, holding it between her teeth. She wouldn’t really eat it, given that she needed it for the case, but she had to follow through her words _somehow_.

The room inside was part study, part laboratory. She saw a sealed bookcase and several large shelves holding bottles of dry ingredients covering the back wall. Another bookshelf on the room’s east side was stuffed with books on sorcery. A huge table parked in the middle of the room took up the most space. Half of it was covered with potion mixing utensils and jars, while the other half had a large easel positioned on top of it. A large square of parchment was on it, but although there were words imprinted on the surface Moira couldn’t read them. Nearby, something thick and bubbly boiled in a cauldron, but no scent filled the room.

What kind of experiments was the Frog Prince conducting in here? Hopefully nothing nefarious, and nothing more innocent than trying to end his curse. Moira gave the cauldron a wide berth and reached for a book laying on a nearby side table. She opened it where a ribbon bookmark had been placed, but the only thing of note was a silver coin minted with a frog’s face. The pages underneath was blank. She pocketed the coin and put the book back, circling around the room to reach the sealed bookcase. A solitary piece of paper was nailed into the wood.

The ink was faded in some spots, but she was able to read some of it. The note spoke of some sort of ancient wand currently sealed up in the castle armory, and how it had potent magic powers.

Moira ignored it. She had no access to the castle currently and couldn’t verify whether the note was factual or not. She chose to focus her attention on something new: a locked safe west of the bookcase with sorcery books.

It had gears with buttons. A series of pictures along the top of the safe door depicted the life and death of a tree, but only the first and last pictures were concretely set. The rest of the series would have to be manipulated by the gear buttons. Moira took the tiara out of her mouth and put it back in her hair. Which button would she push first?

She pushed one at random, only to discover that the gears had to be rotated too. There went her hopes of an easy puzzle to solve!

A long time later, Moira was ready to grab the wooden chair behind her and smash the safe open.

“Whatever’s behind this damn safe _better_ be worth the trouble of actually opening it,” she growled.

She took a deep breath and wiped away tears of frustration. She took out her journal and started sketching out the puzzle, outlining its mechanics and how it worked. This would be a _fantastic_ puzzle to train new hires with, provided the agency could replicate it from her messy notes. Doing this cleared her mind a little, and when she finished writing her notes she got back to work. She rotated a gear, then pushed another button. Rotated the gear whose button she just pushed. Rotated it a few more times.

The safe door popped open. Moira let out a shout of joy and grabbed the sheaf of papers nestled inside. They were stained with grass and dirt, but they depicted a familiar looking blueprint. She peered closer at it and realized what it was.

It was that theater in the Swan Princess mausoleum!

Moira couldn’t run back there fast enough after putting the blueprints inside her journal. But when she tried to enter the building, something invisible kept stopping her. She backed up and went to the gold bird cages. There were at least three gears scattered in the debris, along with other odds and ends she didn’t recall being there last time. She gathered them all and ended up with a large gilded crank.

She went inside and pushed the crank into the theater, giving it an experimental turn. The theater shuddered to life, and the curtains parted. Two puppets – the Prince and the Swan Princess – moved mechanically back and forth on the stage, wobbling when they hit either end of the stage. They couldn’t touch each other, always standing apart despite the romantic dance.

Moira grabbed the ship bottle that lay discarded on the stage, but she didn’t watch the puppets for too long.

The way they moved was some form of visual metaphor for the Frog Prince and his wives: always together, but always apart.


	6. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Thanksgiving! I'm sorry for the delay, real life things got in the way and I, uh, may have started binge-watching a TV series.

The junk drawer provided Moira a brief respite from looking at the puppets. The contents were… mostly… the same. She didn’t recall seeing foliage in the small vase on the floor to the drawer’s left the first time around. Or the tiny… hull of a ship tucked haphazardly in the top open drawer. She’d seen an empty bottle too, that had rolled toward the back wall at one point. Had these pieces of the ship bottle always been there? Judging from the junk, these pieces probably had been buried for ages and she was just now discovering them.

But! One more bottle to the collection. Only one more to find before she could open the door across from the greenhouse.

She took out the map and scrutinized it closely. There were two small pulsing dots: one close by, very likely the area with the sword encased in green rock. The other… the greenhouse? None of the specific rooms on the map were labelled. Moira contemplated taking her pen and writing down the room names but stopped herself. The pen ink could cause unknown but possibly irreplaceable damage to the magical papers, not to mention Anne would physically throw her off the roof for ruining a valuable piece of information to the fairy tale realms.

If the map could be scanned in without frying the scanner and its computer in the process, that would be a great day indeed.

Though the image of Anne—who was several inches shorter than Moira—throwing her off the roof of the agency provided a funny mental image to contemplate while Moira made her way back to the sword. There was another item to be found at the Cinderella statue; judging from the pieces she gradually found, some sort of plant or rose emblem. Her only problem was finding the last piece.

To her luck, the damn thing was probably camouflaged. One other piece of the emblem had been disguised as part of the stonework in the alcove. Was this last piece glass or stone? She didn’t want to slice her skin open digging through the roses that bloomed at the statue’s feet. Moira shook the flowers roughly, working her way up the statue base, until she heard a _clink_ against stone. She picked it up and set it down with the pieces she found, and the emblem formed right before her eyes.

It was as large as a dinner plate, octagonal shaped, with a rose gold hue in the middle. Vaguely, she remembered seeing an indent for such a shape somewhere near the castle entrance, but was it at the gates or in the greenhouse? Moira walked over to the castle gates and sighed after looking at the lock. No, not here. She had the large shield emblem already, and she was still looking for the other two pieces that went on either side of it… maybe? She shifted the octagon emblem into the crook of her arm, took out the silver frog coin she’d found in the greenhouse, and held it up to the silver colored indent. Almost a perfect match? Maybe she only needed to find the gold counterpart. Which, frankly, could be hidden anywhere around here.

She put the coin back and ducked into the greenhouse. She felt an item had to be found among the flowers again, but she muscled her way past it and walked up to the glass door. The lock featured an octagon shape, which was the only clue she needed before pushing the emblem in. The door unlocked audibly and slid open to the left. At first glance into the room beyond, more exotic plants greeted her, though the more Moira looked, the more like this space looked like a cozy retreat. She stepped inside.

A haphazardly laid stone path provided a walkway through short green grass. A small lake covered with lily pads took up a large portion of the space in the north. A stone arch stretched the diameter of the pond, with a quaint stone frog emitting a large light from its mouth perched on top of it. A solitary bench being overrun with moss stood to the right of the pathway. A rusted key lay on the seat portion, and Moira grabbed it. She gingerly put it inside an interior pocket before moving on.

A machine lay next to some cacti, though she didn’t notice it until she had walked a little farther inside. Moira squatted down in front of it. A homey little bookcase had been converted to hold six things, with small pipes lining the tops of the shelves. Those pipes converged into a single pipe that led into some sort of large… mixer? A tiny vial was placed at the very bottom of it. Numbers lined the front of the mixer, and a pull cord was attached to one of the pipes on the left side of the bookcase.

_Something_ had to be mixed here, but to make what? A potion? With little to go on and no way to operate it, Moira stood up and started to leave. Midway up the path, she spotted a piece of paper on the ground and picked it up. The handwriting was a messy scrawl, and dirt made it almost illegible in some places. She was only able to read one word in three.

“Potion… end curse?” she read out loud. “Six… pants? Plants. Should have… short? Shorted? Shortly.”

If she followed the note correctly, there was a potion to end a curse and it needed six plants. But what kind of plants? It seemed odd that only plants were needed, but who was she to judge? This wasn’t her world. Things worked much, much differently here. Besides, the Frog Prince could be studying ways to end his curse by himself, and this was probably just one of them.

Moira put the note back where she found it and went back into the main greenhouse. Time to see what the flowers would give her this time. Hopefully, something she could use right away.

&

She found another elemental jar. Probably an air element, but Moira wasn’t in the mood to find out. She managed to put it into the bag, though she had to physically shove it in to make it fit and she couldn’t zip the bag up afterward. Hopefully—hopefully—she could find the last ship bottle around here someplace, because even though the items couldn’t break when dropped, the noise they made hitting the stone would probably attract the Frog Prince. She adjusted the bag to a more comfortable place on her shoulder and walked out of the greenhouse.

She looked to her right. The map had said there was something to be found here…

Was that a _bottle_ on the windowsill?

Moira slid the bag off her shoulder and ran over there. Yes, there was a bottle, and she soon assembled the rest of the ship after a few minutes of searching. Almost giddy with excitement, she went back to the bag, took out all the other bottles she’d found, and walked up to the nautical themed door.

The puzzle on the door was a matching one: match the ship bottle to the exquisitely detailed oil paintings of ships. Little lanterns were positioned to the right of each painting. Moira stuck a bottle on a little stand beneath the painting at random. Stuck another one on. A third one. No lanterns lit up. She got lucky with one of them – a pirate ship – but the other two got no reaction. She looked closer at the bottles. Through the curved glass, she could see the ships inside were almost an exact match to the paintings, a feat of craft making she was envious of. Her only talent was needle felting, at the expense of stabbing her fingers multiple times.

Once she had looked closer at the bottles, matching them to the paintings was almost too easy. In no time she had the lanterns lit up and watched as a large golden ship in the middle of the door wobbled in place. The door unlocked and swung inward. Moira grabbed her bag, zipped it back up, and stepped inside.

A dock and a huge subterranean lake were what she saw first. There was a shrine on a pier in the middle of the lake. Both areas were awash with light from carefully positioned, very brightly lit lanterns. She next saw a sturdy rowboat tied to the dock, with an oar missing. Moira put the oar she’d been hauling around inside of it and looked around.

A creeping dread gradually arose in her. To reach the shrine, she was going to have to row the boat across the water.

“_Fuck._”

She recalled the animatronic rowing the boat in her last Ravenhearst case. The way its arms had moved. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to not remember anything else about that scene. If she copied the animatronic, she could probably get across the water with little issue.

Legs shaking, she got into the boat and untied it, taking the rope with her into the boat. She picked up the oar, put it in the water.

There was a first time for everything, right? If nothing else, she could just swim.

&

This wasn’t going as planned. Moira had one oar to her memory of the animatronic’s two. She somehow veered wildly off course at some point and accidentally rowed to the back of the lake. After a bit of maneuvering, she managed to turn around without losing anything and slowly but surely rowed her way to the pier. One thing was certain: she was going to sign up for lessons the minute she got back to the agency. It was just an optional training session when she’d been initially hired on at the agency, and she kicked herself for not taking advantage of it the first time around.

Finally, she reached the pier. Reaching out for one of the poles sticking out, Moira tied the boat’s rope to it. After a couple of tries, she managed to get out of the boat without falling and grabbed her bag. The shrine was surprisingly tiny up close, but the bulk of it was likely underwater. Fitting for the mermaid wife, whose effigy stared out over the water.

A large fish statue caught her attention first. It was a whimsical carving of an unknown species, and its front fins reached upward toward its head. An inscription on the statue’s base read ‘Crown the big fish and the path will be shown’.

Moira looked at the shrine entrance and felt a headache forming. It was as brightly lit as the dock was, and after spending a long time on the darkened water, it made her eyes hurt. The glass doors in front of her reflected most of the light, and there was no way to open them. She stepped forward to investigate them, and almost stumbled. Looking down, she saw what had tripped her up: a large indent in the shape of a giant seashell, around an inch deep. That would probably open the doors for her, if she found it.

Her headache seemed to intensify when she walked toward the right. A massive, overflowing treasure chest stood at the end of the pier, and Moira was willing to dive head-first into the water to prove that an item was broken up and buried there. She bent down in front of it and started picking through the pile.

Not all the contents of the chest were strictly treasure such as gems and gold. Some were just common seashells one might find at the beach. Moira saw a torn piece of a map written in an undecipherable language. She also saw a dagger hilt sticking out of a box. There were also many, many pearls strewn about, along with… broken crown pieces?

Her first clue had been the red velvet and silver curved pieces that held up the headwear. She started emptying out the treasure chest by the handful, carefully piling things up next to her. With a chest as varied as this, _anything_ could make up the crown. After picking up a third pearl-studded cross and setting it aside with two other she’d found, along with a gold piece decorated with gems, the pile shifted abruptly. Moira watched as the pile fell as pieces pieced themselves back together, and she threw an arm out to make sure nothing fell into the water.

The finished crown looked just like the Queen’s, just in miniature form and in exact detail, right down to the white fur. Moira gingerly set it to the side and scooped up what she’d taken out, putting them back inside the chest. It wouldn’t do good to just leave them out; with the way her rowing skills were, she could accidentally kick something into the water just by trying to get in and out of the boat. When she finished, she picked the crown up, walked over to the fish statue, and set the crown on its head.

Nothing happened for a few minutes, and Moira thought she had the wrong crown. She adjusted it on the fish’s head and heard a scrapping noise. The statue moved to the left, revealing a hidden ladder it’d been sitting on. She climbed down into the room below and looked around.

Unfortunately, there was very little in the way of value for her to use in her investigation. The Frog Prince seemed to use this as a place to store any treasures he’d found in his long life. The only thing worth noticing was a little dais on the room’s left side. A parted red curtain showed off a large glass case. Inside of it was the large seashell needed to open the glass doors, and the only way to get it out was by solving another puzzle.

The puzzle lock was similar in execution to the one Moira had seen in the Swan Princess’s mausoleum, but the way of solving it was different. Instead of getting the right number of fish across four panels, this one required manipulating the panels so each of the broken pieces painting on it could form a single object depicted to the left of the first panel. In this case, it was a large moon emblem.

_God, I hate these kinds of puzzles!_ Moira thought acidly.

She pushed a button at random and prepared herself mentally. It was just a matter of looking at the emblem closely and seeing the pieces reflected on the panels, and then determining the order the pieces would go in, but it takes far more time than she liked. When the panels disappeared and revealed a safe door, Moira breathed a sigh of relief.

She grabbed the seashell and hefted it experimentally. It was solid but lightweight, and she squeaked when it unexpectedly bent in her hands. It wasn’t _rubbery_, but… flexible. This made getting it out of the small opening a lot easier when Moira pushed it through a couple of minutes later. The shell unbent itself after it’d been placed on the ground, and naturally assumed its proper fanned-out shape after a minute.

Moira picked it up and pushed it down into the indent in front of the glass doors. They opened noiselessly, and she spotted another ladder leading downstairs.

She wouldn’t be surprised if the rest of the shrine was fashioned like an aquarium. The only question was, what would she find down there?


	7. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not important but I did include a brief spoiler for the end of Mystery Case Files: Escape from Ravenhearst somewhere in the chapter. I don't remember where but it's there.

Moira carefully climbed down the ladder and turned around. She expected to be greeted with the memorial to the mermaid wife right away, but no. She found herself in a small, dim entryway featuring a long staircase going downward. Lamps were hung on hooks at intervals leading down, providing enough light to see by.

At first, she couldn’t see anything as she descended the staircase. But the farther she got down, the more the memorial was revealed.

The room was situated under the lake itself and fashioned as a museum-like display and an aquarium. Seashell shaped lamps were placed between the three thick glass panes that separated the lake from the room. The middle glass pane showcased the enormous marble statue of the mermaid wife sitting upon a seashell throne under the water. Whoever had sculpted her likeness had attempted to make her expression appear serene and peaceful, but the water and the glass made her look forlorn. Lake fish darted in and out of sight of the glass.

The room had been shaped into an octagon by the glass-paned display cases. Relics, jewels, and several different sized seashells had been placed inside of them. However, one of the displays – the one directly in front of the statue – had been smashed open. Broken glass littered the floor in front of the display case, and shards crunched under Moira’s boots when she went to look at it.

Nothing _looked_ like it had been taken, but since this was her first time in here, Moira couldn’t be sure. She didn’t see blood on the glass or on the floor, but whatever had been used to smash the glass was long gone. A gold token embossed with a crowned frog, nestled in a deep red cloth, was simply… there to be taken.

It looked like an identical copy to the silver one she’d found in the laboratory. Moira took that one out to be sure, and she was right. Mostly. The two frogs were functionally and aesthetically identical, but they faced opposite sides of the coins.

She picked up the gold coin and turned to face the stairs. After waiting a few dangerous minutes, her body primed for a fight or flight response, she stuck the coin in a pocket. No one had followed her here, and no one was going to surprise her and accuse her of theft. After all, it could have been the Frog Prince who smashed the display case in a fit of grief because he missed his wife so much.

The Frog Prince’s… absence kept her thinking as she left the shrine and rowed back to the greenhouse. He thought of her as an intruder, but he had done absolutely nothing beyond imprisoning her down here after she’d tried to rescue Marie and her bodyguard. He wasn’t even stopping her from running amok in his kingdom and unlocking all his secrets. Either Princess Ivy was keeping him away, or he saw her as a way to end his curse.

Unless she unlocked a random door and found him waiting, ready to berate her for being a trespasser, knock her out, and then lock her up somewhere so she’d never be able to finish her case…

Moira pinched herself to banish the thought. She’d been unprepared and unable to react accordingly when that had happened the second time she had investigated Ravenhearst. But she _had_ escaped, she _had_ solved the case—

And both Charles and Victor Dalimar couldn’t hurt her anymore.

She saw to that when she’d set their Ravenhearst replica on fire and left them to die in the throes of what they’d assumed was a victory.

The boat hit the dock, and Moira heaved herself out. She tied the boat and walked out of the lake area. Hopefully, she wouldn’t have to use it again for a while.

&

The palace gate opened outward after she inserted the silver and gold coins. She took the map out and stepped inside, watching with fascination as the blank page was filled in to show a map of the palace interior. A small, faint red dot appeared in one room, presumably the one directly in front of where she stood. A small arrow had been drawn on the top of the palace map, indicating there was more to be drawn once she got to that point. Based on the drawing, it looked like a tunnel.

The ink’s lines were getting thinner. Moira put the map away with a feeling of dread.

She stood in a hallway. At the end of it was an opened door, and her heart skipped a beat when she saw a human-shaped shadow pass behind it. The Frog Prince? Princess Ivy? The Evil Godmother? It could be any of those three. Or a simple illusion, like in Briar Rose’s case.

Moira watched the shadow pass by the door four more times before her heart settled down and she could say for certain that it was an illusion. No one had come down to greet her in here at all, the Frog Prince seemed too serious to pull a prank, and she hadn’t felt the aura of the Evil Godmother at all here. She shook her head and started taking in more of her surroundings.

A large statue of Princess Ivy stood on a pedestal to her left. In front of her was an end table with a bottle of red ink, which she grabbed and put into a pocket. Across the table was another hallway, and Moira went down there first. She didn’t know what she’d find at the end of the hallway, but the rancid smell coming out of there was enough to make her stomach turn.

Gloved hand over her mouth and nose, Moira used her free hand to open the door.

She found herself standing in the threshold of a kitchen. A kitchen that hadn’t been used in years.

Barrels stood empty along the walls. There was no sink from what she could see. Plates and silverware were gathering dust on a large table in the middle of the room. Moira moved past it and stepped toward a long counter. Pots and pants hung on hooks attached to the wall, but they looked like they hadn’t been washed in years. Same with the dishes and chopping boards underneath them.

Did the Frog Prince not need to eat? Or had he kept servants that had left or simply vanished?

A poster caught her eye next. It had words and a diagram on… making a potion? She looked closer at the yellowing paper. A _frog_ potion?! What would the Frog Prince need this for? Had all those frogs and toads in the forest outside been experimented on with this potion, turning them from the people they once were into their current amphibian forms?

A small croaking noise broke through her concentration. Moira turned around.

A frog, perched on a dusty silver platter, stared back at her. It wore a tiny silver crown, and it followed her every move with its hauntingly human eyes.

_The Frog Prince found me!_ Moira thought.

She bolted from the kitchen and ran into the greenhouse. She slammed the door shut and slid to the floor, her heart hammering in her chest. She was done for. She could only lock herself in here for so long, and she had no weapons on hand but her overstuffed bag and her fists.

She waited.

Waited longer.

She heard no footsteps at all.

Moira took a deep breath and stood up. She turned around and looked out the window.

No one was standing outside.

Maybe that… _hadn’t_ been the Frog Prince?

She exited the greenhouse quietly and crept back into the kitchen. The frog was still on the platter and made no attempt to hop away. Maybe it couldn’t escape. Who know?

The only thing that mattered was that she’d acted like a well-intentioned fool. A fool out to defend her life, but still a fool.

Moira left the kitchen and walked toward the end of the hallway. She only stepped inside the new room after making absolute sure that the frog hadn’t followed her.

&

The room was a very large antechamber, with at least three doors: two on the ground level where Moira was standing, and the other at the top of a flight of stairs. Unfortunately, two of the doors were blocked by a knight statue and a scholar statue that were clearly missing items from their hands. The double doors at the top of the stairs weren’t… directly blocked, but the unadorned prince statue clearly blocked the most direct way to it by being positioned at the bottom of the stairs.

Moira hoped that statue wouldn’t move, because she had pains, and that meant an item. She took a step forward. Another. Past the scholar statue positioned on the prince statue’s right. When she was sure the prince statue hadn’t moved an inch, she hobbled up the stairs toward another shattered display case.

Once upon a time, this had held old royal regalia and jewels. Junk and other items had settled into the display case over time. An overturned candlestick had dribbled melted wax over some of the cracked glass and dried. Moira wasn’t sure what she was looking for, so she followed the same principle as the treasure chest by the lake: take items out until something fixed itself.

Soon enough, she had a goblet in her hands. It was mostly made of gold, with flower motifs and small pink diamonds in the middle of the flowers. The cup portion of the goblet was a deep green color reminiscent of grass, with a golden rim. Moira stuffed it into the bag and pulled out the ink she’d found.

The ink was a bright red color and splashed inside its container when she shook it. What could she use this for? She hadn’t encountered a puzzle that required writing at all. There _was_ that parchment in the laboratory, but the words were imprinted and barely legible.

Unless it was like that on purpose.

She went back there and carefully opened the vial. With shaking hands, she dripped a few drops onto the parchment. Lines formed, but she didn’t see any words written down. A few minutes later, after pouring the rest of the ink onto the parchment, she knew why.

This was a map featuring the greenhouse and the lake shrine; a twin to the one she carried but on a larger scale. The only difference aside from size was that on the one in front of her, someone had drawn an X on the pier and then drew an arrow leading away from it. It led to drawings of a treasure chest, a crowned frog, and a potion bottle.

Had the Frog Prince hidden his frog potion in that treasure chest on the pier?

Moira raced to the dock and paddled as fast as she could to the pier. She plopped herself down in front of the chest and began searching. Her most obvious clue was the glass portion of a broken… beaker? Cup? It contained a deep green liquid, and she lifted it out first. It was just a matter of finding the other pieces to this now.

That turned out to be surprisingly easy: most of the chest contents remained the same, save for where Moira had disturbed them earlier. She took out the pieces that stood out the most and soon had a completed potion bottle in her hands.

A thought struck her: what would happen if she used this potion on the frog? Would it reverse its condition and become human again? An ally – and a living, breathing one at that too – would be nice to have.

If the potion didn’t work… well, she’d be one potion short and dealing with the consequences later.

&

This was the moment of truth.

Moira uncorked the potion and dripped it onto the frog. White light enveloped the frog, and she poured the rest of the potion on it in a fit of panic.

The white light grew into—

“A pig? A _PIG_?!”

Moira dropped the empty potion bottle and it shattered on the ground.

Had the pig been transformed into a frog? The potion had reversed it back, so most likely yes? What did this mean for Marie and her bodyguard? Had they been transformed into frogs and she’d just wasted the only way to turn them back? She didn’t want to meet the Chancellor and just… give them the frog that was their daughter.

She sank to the floor and pulled out her journal, writing down everything that had just happened.

There had to be another way to change Marie and her bodyguard back, if they had been transformed in the first place. There had to be.

But she wasn’t going to find it just sitting here and panicking. Moira picked herself up and looked at the pig. It stared up adoringly at her. She gave it a friendly scratch behind the ears and walked away.

If she solved this case, she’d come back for it and set it free. Maybe. _She_ couldn’t adopt it; her brother would have a cow at the very thought. Hopefully she’d be able to find a nearby farmer who could take the pig in.

&

The map had stopped showing the red dots altogether. Moira put it back and sighed heavily. Time to search everywhere until the realm punched her in the head or in the abdominal area. She searched the palace antechamber and then all the greenhouse areas and felt nothing. When she got to the pier though, she felt a mild tug.

Her poor shoulders were going to need a deep massage when this case was over.

She found a second tiara in the treasure chest. Studded with diamonds and featuring a large blue shell, with tiny starfish scattered around, there was little doubt as to whom this tiara belonged to. Moira contemplated where to put it. Not her head, because she was still wearing the Swan Princess tiara. Not her bag or coat, it wouldn’t fit.

She straightened her left arm and pushed open the tiara ends with her free hand. She nudged the tiara down until it circled her bicep. It didn’t budge at all when she moved her arm in different directions and flexed it. If Moira was careful, she could carry the rest of the crowns on her arms and not worry about storage at all.

With that dilemma solved, she got back in the boat and rowed back to shore. She went back to the gardens and the statues of the wives. Nothing. Upon backtracking to the Swan Princess mausoleum, she felt the tug again, but where was it coming from?

Moira checked the underground lake first. It was still a breathtaking sight to behold, but she didn’t feel an item here.

Upon entry to the theater room though, she saw and felt something was off. Maybe it was the cramping in her abdomen. Maybe it was the large, broken glass full of a blue liquid that wasn’t there before that was perched on top of the top opened drawer.

Either way, she soon had her next item: another flower vial, with a sprig of ivy inside. She put it in with the first one she found and left the mausoleum. All she had left to explore now was the underground cave. Making her way to the hole, Moira jumped down and started crawling through the tunnel. It was slow-going, with her bulging bag impeding her progress, but she finally managed to squeeze herself out with only minor difficulty.

Her head began to hurt, but she wasn’t sure if it was because of the dim lighting down here or if another item had to be found. She stood up, trying to not wince at how loud her knee cracked, and made her way to the table in front of her.

It… looked the same. But there hadn’t been a solid and shiny gold apple among the broken odds and ends the last time she’d been here. Moira picked up pieces and set them aside. The result was a golden apple resting atop a tiny purple and gold stand. Visually, it looked identical to the silver one she already carried.

And wasn’t there an unopened mausoleum with an apple tree in front of it?

Moira shoved both apples in her bag and crawled out of the underground area as fast as her body and bag would allow. She made her way to Snow White’s cottage and put the apples on their respective colored stands.

When the door opened, she expected to smell… well, a well-kept home. Snow White had, traditionally, lived with seven dwarves and took care of them while on the run from her evil stepmother and her Huntsman.

She felt a strange draft of cold air instead, and stepped inside cautiously.

Princess Ivy abruptly materialized in front of her with a bright flash of green. Moira barely had time to pull out her tape recorder and hit record before Ivy began speaking.

_“Not long after the Frog Prince wedded Snow White, a terrible curse fell upon him once again. He would remain forever in human form, but any mortal he touched would turn into a frog.”_

Moira’s jaw dropped. She set the tape recorder down and started getting her journal out, but Ivy hit her with a spell that sent her keeling over. The princess kept talking, her voice echoing in Moira’s head.

_“Shortly after, the exiled Prince made this forest his home and built an underground kingdom full of shrines to his loved ones.”_

In her mind’s eye, Moira saw an image of the Frog Prince standing on the same cliff she had earlier. Exiled? Why had he been exiled?

The scene changed. She saw the palace he built.

_“The Chancellor’s daughter, as well has many others, have been cursed by him. Only you can save them before it is too late.”_

Moira felt the spell dissolve, but she couldn’t move. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. She fumbled for the tape recorder and stopped it. Out of the corner of her eye, Princess Ivy vanished.

She could… think about this later. After a nice, long nap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this chapter out longhand and then typed it up in one sitting. It's almost midnight. I am never making this mistake again. I'm so tired.


	8. Chapter Six

“Fucking… fyuck. Fuck. Ivy?”

She was sprawled out on the floor of Snow White’s shrine, with a head full of cobwebs and a patch of drool on the floor. Odd, she didn’t remember falling. Princess Ivy was gone too. The chilly atmosphere in here made her want to curl up for warmth, but she didn’t know how long she’d slept. She removed her bag and slowly rolled over on her back, staring up at the ceiling to gather her thoughts, stretch stiffened muscles, and not think about how much her head hurt right now.

Princess Ivy had come before her without warning _again_ and fired another spell that forced her to see events of the past and mentally be force-fed more information about the Frog Prince. It was draining, being compelled to see things you’re not prepared for and process them quickly. Being hit on the head with a hammer or waking up from being blackout drunk the night prior would each be a more pleasurable experience at this point.

“What did she tell me about the Frog Prince? Ivy told me his curse… he got a second curse?” she wondered out loud. “First he’s doomed to become a frog whenever the wife who turned him back into a human passed away. And _now_ he’s doomed to remain human but he’s able to turn everyone he touches into a frog?”

She threw an arm over her eyes. Fuck, that didn’t sound like a second curse.

“Maybe… maybe that first curse morphed or something. Maybe it corrupted?” she asked herself. “God, Frog Prince, what happened when you married Snow White? What did you _do_?!”

She wished she could summon Princess Ivy and have her explain the curses. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible. The most she could do at this point was write everything down. Sitting up, she grabbed her bag and opened it. After a few minutes of rummaging, she pulled out her spiral bound journal and opened to the nearest blank page. She wrote down what she’d learned about the curses, forcing her muddled, aching brain to recall everything Ivy had told her up to this point.

Four and a half pages later, Moira’s brain felt like it’d been run over by a bus and her writing hand hurt like hell, but she had what looked like a detailed analysis in front of her. It would help her immensely when she finally finished the case and submitted her report to Anne.

But there was a great deal to do before she could even consider closing the case. She put the journal and the fallen tape recorder away and looked around while rubbing her aching hand. Was that an opened casket in the corner? The Frog Prince didn’t seem the type to display dead corpses, but none of the other shrines she’d encountered so far had this feature. What made this one different?

&

She was right about the open casket. It was displayed on a raised bier, with a suit of armor keeping an eternal vigil over it. A round glass window had been positioned precisely so moonlight could flood in and shine on the wooden mannequin meant to resemble Snow White laying inside. Moira was almost afraid to touch her; she’d been crafted so lifelike that if one ignored the obvious wooden arms and painted face, she could easily sit up and start talking.

At least it wasn’t a pile of bones or mummified, decayed remains. She’d had enough of seeing human corpses.

Why was Snow White displayed like this? Ivy had had a closed tomb. The Swan Princess and the Mermaid had no visible resting places, just shrines to honor their memory. Could Snow White… still be alive? Had she and the Frog Prince separated?

_What an audacious thought_, Moira thought to herself. She removed her journal and tape recorder from her bag and shoved her latest item acquisition – another elemental jar, from the opened casket – inside. _Ivy’s magic is affecting your mind._

The tape recorder went into a bottom coat pocket, and after making an “official” journal entry over Ivy’s warning about the Frog Prince’s curse affecting the people who went missing in the Black Forest, she tucked the journal in the same pocket. The map pages sticking out crinkled and folded, but those could be smoothed out later.

The tiny dining table with its seven little stools held nothing of interest to look at or take, though Moira knew her youngest niece would absolutely _love_ playing tea parties with it. She next turned around to look at the large dresser next to one of the stools. It had been pushed up against the wall, and a box lined with red velvet on the inside caught her attention. Inside was a large gold bracelet studded with emeralds, and it looked like something Ivy may have worn when she was alive. Why would it be displayed here in a shrine dedicated to Snow White? It didn’t… fit with the homey aesthetic of this shrine. Moira took the bracelet and put it on. There was probably another use for it somewhere in the castle, and it wouldn’t hurt to wear it for a while. She never had the money to buy expensive jewelry for herself anyway.

The painting framed above the dresser caught her eye next. It depicted Snow White in front of a cottage, but the bottom right corner had been torn out and the frame was crooked. Moira fixed it, and the empty space in the torn corner was filled up by a previously unseen button. If anything, there was a secret room somewhere in here. She pushed the button and watched as the wall to the left of the painting shuddered and slid open.

She peeked inside the newly revealed room. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with mirrors of varying sizes. A small table had been set up beneath the largest mirror, with small bottles and a music box missing its dancer set up on its surface. A ripple of light from the mirror caught her attention. At first, she thought it was a trick in the light by the two lanterns position nearby, but then the woman’s face appeared.

Ghost? Ghostly woman’s face. It appeared in the mirror for a few seconds, disappeared for a few more seconds, then reappeared. Moira stared at it for a few minutes, and finally registered that the woman’s mouth was moving and saying… something, but with no voice it was difficult to tell what message she was trying to impart. Perhaps she’d be a little more forthcoming if Moira returned the dancer to the music box?

She stepped out of the room and left the cottage-shrine entirely. Stepping into the gardens, she felt a mild tug in front of the Swan Princess mausoleum and went inside. The tug reached its apex the closer she got to the lake, and soon she realized why. There were… doll limbs floating in the lake waters, bobbing along the surface along with some clothes. It looked like a macabre crime scene, just without blood.

Fortunately, the parts were easy to retrieve thanks to the flat rocks that protruded from the water, so Moira didn’t need to go swimming to retrieve anything. A good thing too, because the water felt freezing cold beneath her gloves! What she eventually assembled was not one, but two dancers perched atop a grooved stand. If this topper were placed on a music box, there was no doubt the dancers would move on their fixed path and embrace when they met up. She dried them off as she walked back to Snow White’s cottage-shrine, and soon placed them on the bare music box.

A panel on the front of the box slid open, revealing another four-panel puzzle. This round: connect a solid path between a blue and green square. Moira was willing to give the Frog Prince one thing: when it came to these puzzles, he had much better variety and creativity than the Evil Godmother and her marble puzzles in Briar Rose’s castle.

Finally, the box slid open. Moira took out the piece of parchment laying inside and examined it. A red substance that disturbingly looked like blood had been smeared on in a few places, but the scholar statue from the palace had been drawn in. The book he was supposed to be holding had been circled, but the undecipherable writing next to it offered no clues to its location.

The palace seemed like a logical place to look first, right? The statue was _there_, after all.

&

The pig she’d rescued earlier had fallen asleep on its tray when Moira reentered the kitchen. She’d been right to investigate the palace first, but it hadn’t occurred to her that there’d be a broken item in the kitchen. There hadn’t been any the last time she’d been in here, but… things just. Worked like that. Around here. She’d yet to figure out how beyond her theory that things were just… hidden and she dug them out looking for other things.

Just this once, she’d love to hear an item breaking in the distance the next time she had to nose around.

There were fragments of a stone book on the shelves lined with jars and other assorted crockery, but some of the pieces were just a little too well hidden. It took her ages to assemble the whole thing. By the time she was done, the pig’s nap had run its course and it was up and alert, staring at her cutely. She almost couldn’t bear to leave it behind this time.

“Come here~” she cooed.

The pig tried its hardest to get off the tray and come to her. But it couldn’t move, and it could only squeal pathetically in her general direction. Moira peered down on the tray’s surface and scrutinized it. There was nothing on the surface—not glue, not sticky paste, not even tape if such a thing existed here—that suggested the pig was stuck to it. Was this the realm’s doing? The pig had served its purpose, so it was just… doomed to sit here forever?

“I’m going to come back here when I get this shit with the Frog Prince sorted out.” she told the pig. “If you’re not running around by then, I’m going to carry you out of here on the tray myself. I don’t even care that my boss might have a cow at me bringing things back. I’m not leaving you behind.”

She patted the pig on the head and left the kitchen for the antechamber. The scholar statue moved aside when she gave him his book back, and the door he’d been guarding opened wide. The library beyond was small but stuffed with bookcases stacked double with books. There were two doors on opposite ends of the room: one that had a portrait of a woman over the door (Cinderella most likely, judging from a glass slipper on a cushion next to the door) and one that _looked_ like a mural, but something big and gold glimmered on it.

The not-mural was a woman wearing a bracelet identical to what Moira was wearing, but one of her wrists was bare. Reluctantly, Moira slid the one she was wearing off and gave it back to the mural. She stepped back to let the door open, and promptly forgot her momentary sadness upon gazing into the room beyond.

“Holy shit. Who hides their treasury inside of the library?”

The Frog Prince, apparently. Moira walked inside. Heaps of riches were piled all around the room, some in overflowing chests and others allowed to pile up on the floor. Her head started to hurt from the brightly lit lanterns and lamps scattered about reflecting off the gold. She stumbled forward onto a giant frog statue and sat down in front of it. It was a large rotund sculpture, crowned with a gaudy gold crown and looking over the room like a miser.

It took her a solid minute to realize that there was a solid dagger blade sticking to the wall on the frog’s left. Just the blade portion, the hilt wasn’t even there. Moira peeled it off and held it carefully in her hands. The rest of the weapon had to be around on the frog somewhere, but there was a lot of ivy growing around (and on) the statue, plus other jeweled items decorated it.

After a long time searching, she found the rest of the hilt and admired the completed dagger in her hands. It was a handsome weapon with a wicked sharp blade made of good steel… and she had nothing safe to carry it in. She’d meant to make a crude sheath out of leather a while ago, but she couldn’t get her supplies on time. She looked down at her coat. Only a few scattered pockets were filled in, but the blade was too long to fit in any of them at an angle. She checked her two side pockets. They were long enough, but the dagger hilt stuck out awkwardly.

She bent at the waist until she felt the dagger tip press against the top of her thigh, then she slowly squatted until she felt the dagger again. She could do both, just in a limited capacity. Getting down on her knees presented the same challenge. How long would she have to carry this? Hopefully not very long, unless she could free up some space in her bag.

There was a piece of paper stuck to a pillar on the statue’s right. The paper was torn out from some genealogical record, but all the names and portraits had been scratched out completely. It was located high enough that Moira had to stand on her tiptoes to read it the contents, and she still had to squint to read the handwriting.

_When… Ancient Wand… is on? Pour potion and it… imbued with mortal—affect? Effect._

She probably wouldn’t have to worry too much about the wand, it was likely lost a long time ago. But the potion nagged her memory a bit until she remembered the note in the greenhouse. That potion could end any curse. It seemed… ridiculous that pouring something on a piece of wood could make it mortal or give it something akin to mortality. It was also one hell of a waste of potion making.

This was probably one note she could safely ignore.

Before leaving the room, she picked up a small, square portrait of a nondescript princess that had been leaving against a pillar and took it with her. Like the bracelet she found, it looked out of place, especially among the extravagant riches that surrounded it. The most she could do was carry it under her arm; it was too tall and wide to fit in the bag under normal circumstances.

At the shattered display case upstairs, she pieced together a second goblet. It was similar in make to the green one she’d found earlier, but the color was a rosy agate and it had a golden handle on each side of the cup. Could these goblets thematically represent Briar Rose and Ivy? The colors mostly matched the plants associated with them…

Before leaving the palace, Moira made another journal entry: _Entered Snow White’s room. It was fancy like the others, but it felt depressing to be in there._ She could already picture Anne’s frown at the unprofessional tone, but there was only so much Moira could write down while an unsheathed dagger poked dangerously at her thigh.

After not feeling a hint of an item to be found in the rest of what was available to her in the palace, or deep in the cave where the Frog Prince had dropped her into, she went back to the gardens. There was a tug near the Swan Princess mausoleum, but there was nothing to be found inside either room. Moira exited there and went to Snow White’s cottage-shrine, where the feeling intensified almost immediately when she stepped inside.

The mannequin’s casket, of course. What Moira had taken for extra jeweled decoration on its dress and scattered on the bier initially were pieces of another princess tiara. She held up the finished tiara and looked at it, puzzled. There wasn’t an… obvious motif to identify the original owner. The Swan Princess had her swans. The mermaid had her seashells and the turquoise. This one only had rubies scattered among the standard pearls and silver.

The rubies were as red as blood, which could be a callback to the original fairytale about one of the attributes Snow White’s mother wanted her future daughter to have, or it could be a shoutout to the poisoned red apple Snow White eats. But… eh, she’d figure out the owner eventually. She pushed the mermaid’s tiara higher up on her arm and stuck the newest tiara in its place.

Where to go now? There weren’t any items to be found anywhere. There _were_ some areas that needed items to unlock, but at least three of those required a collection of items she hadn’t completed yet. She also hadn’t the item the knight statue wanted. There was also the prince statue’s missing sword… wouldn’t the one encased in the green rock be a good fit?

Moira exited the cottage-shrine, took a right, and stopped in front of the green rock. She took out the dagger and set it aside, kneeling in front of the green panel. She traced the diameter of the empty green circles carved into it with her finger, and then took out the two goblets. The bottom rim of each one was an approximate match. She stuck the green goblet into a circle and waited.

There was no response, not even a click. After waiting a little while longer, she attempted to remove the goblet, but it wouldn’t budge. No amount of pulling and yanking could dislodge it from the circle, and she eventually gave up. This probably meant that the goblets were meant to go on there. Cautiously, she stuck the agate goblet onto the panel.

The rock began vibrating. Slowly at first, at a rate that was almost undetectable to Moira, but then it increased in intensity. That… wasn’t good.

Moira sprang to her feet and ran. Just as she raced outside of the area and dove for cover on the farthest side of the Swan Princess mausoleum, throwing the princess portrait in front of her in the process, the rock exploded with a mighty bang that could be heard for miles. When she didn’t hear the Frog Prince come running, she grabbed the portrait, edged out from her hiding place, and slowly made her way back to the blast zone.

Pieces of rock had scattered all over the place, littering the ground and objects with shiny green gravel and pebbles. Some of the trees had stone debris embedded into them or had bark removed from the force of the blast. There was no sign of the Frog Prince here either. She found the dagger in the shadow of the trees, buried under some fallen leaves and debris, and picked it up to put it back in her pocket.

The sword lay atop of a pile of the largest rocks, unharmed by the explosion. Moira hefted it up, expecting something heavy, but she was surprised at how light it was. A five-year-old could lift it easily with two hands, though it’d be a little too tall for them to hold it over their heads. This wasn’t a weapon to be used in war, this was a weapon for display or for ceremonial purposes.

Which made absolute sense for the prince statue in the palace.

_I wonder what’s behind the doors the statue is guarding…?_ Moira thought as she walked away.


	9. Chapter Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays, everyone! I apologize for the short story chapter, but the in-game chapter it corresponds with really didn't offer anything majorly exciting.
> 
> The "tremor" in this chapter is pure invention on my part; it's an attempt to hand-wave how you suddenly have to find three more items in the palace after finding the orchid flower potion in the greenhouse.

Moira tried to leave the area. However, she felt like she was walking into an invisible wall at the entrance, just like a video game character whose player had gotten distracted and looked away from the screen. With a curse, she turned herself around and went to the Cinderella statue. There, scattered among the rosy foliage, were pieces of a silver shield that must have been shattered by the blast. The completed piece was like the prince sword she now carried: light and ornamented, meant for display. There were no straps on the back of it, which meant going back to the castle carrying several large items awkwardly under her arms. Again.

Fortunately, barring being forced to find items on the way back, at least two of the things she carried could be dropped off at the palace.

&

The double doors behind the prince statue opened when his sword was returned, but the knight statue decided to be picky and refused to budge when given their shield. Moira looked closer at the statue and groaned. It needed to hold something in its other hand too, probably a halberd or another sword.

“Whatever’s behind your door better be damn good,” she growled. She turned on her heel and went upstairs to explore what had been previously inaccessible.

The upstairs room had the appearance of a small receiving hall. Three glass windows along the east wall showed the pitch-black interior of the caves. A large golden door dominated the wall closest to the stairs; a golden statue of a prince identical to the one in the garden was perched on top of it. To the door’s left was an empty lever holder, to its right was a castle model set into its own alcove.

The pieces of the book she found scattered in there formed into a thick tome titled _The Book of Mortality_. Moira spotted a pedestal beneath the middle window and brought the book over to it. She tried to fit it into the book-shaped slot in the middle of the pedestal, but the tome was too large and slid off. She caught it before it crashed to the floor and noticed another scrap of paper on a pillar to her right. Unlike the other scraps of papers she’d found around the castle, not counting the one in the treasury, this one was well preserved and readable.

“The Transmutation Circle is locked under the Princess Temple. It can power on any magical relic,” she read aloud.

So _that_ was the strange lock in front of the princess crown display! But what could be powered upon it? She hadn’t encountered anything that could fit inside of that unique shaped lock yet…

“Could the library help?” Moira asked herself out loud. “Maybe I’ll be able to read the books this time, unlike the library in Briar Rose’s castle…”

At the library, she moved a few stacks of books aside and grabbed one at random from the top of a pile. The cover opened easily, cracking the spine, but the pages stuck fast to each other. Even using the dagger between the pages failed to unstick them. Not to be deterred, she put the book aside and grabbed a book from the shelf closest to her. This one could be opened, and its pages could be turned, but the words were written in Cyrillic. Moira reached for a third book, but discovered a book missing on the bottom row. Looking closer, the books down there dealt with sorcery.

It was a shelf that had escaped her notice the first time she walked in here. The large gap between the books was an approximate match to the book she carried, if measuring their widths with her fingers counted. What would she have to lose if she stuck the book in there? She couldn’t open it and read it, and there was a possibility that nothing could happen if she stuck the book in. With a small grunt of effort, Moira hefted the book up and slid it into the gap.

Nothing seemed to happen for a minute, and she let out a sigh of relief. Just as she reached for the book, the bookcase began to shake violently and she jumped back, knocking over a stack of books. She tripped backwards over one of them and fell to the floor. When she gathered her bearings – and any fallen items – the bookcase had stopped shaking. Protruding from the bottom of the bookcase was a shelf lined in black cloth, and on top of the cloth was a small book bound in red leather. Stepping over the fallen books, Moira reached out and picked the book up.

It looked and felt small enough to be a diary, though some modern journals she’d seen nowadays were the size of standard notebooks. The cover showed no signs of who the owner was. Had one of the wives owned this? Had the Frog Prince himself written his daily thoughts and struggles in here?

It didn’t matter; the book couldn’t be opened, and Moira had no interest in reading the secrets of the dead or the immortal. That could be dangerous indeed, and probably too tragic to comprehend. Holding the book close, she left the library and went back upstairs.

&

The book fit into the slot easily. She pushed it down into the slot and heard a panel slide open behind her. Turned toward the noise, she discovered a niche in the golden door beneath three stacked green gems. On closer inspection, the niche was solid except for a carved-out space in the shape of an outline of a small knife. She removed the dagger from her pocket. Would this dagger open the door? Or would she have to look for the lever too? Whatever it was, she was glad to relinquish the dagger. Holding it carefully, she pushed it into the niche and stepped backwards.

A good thing too, because when the door opened a bunch of ivy vines spilled out. They didn’t move, didn’t seem sentient, and there wasn’t a whiff of magic around them. Moira sucked in a breath and cautiously stepped forward. She pushed the vines aside and ventured into the following room with dread.

The sound of gushing water did little to calm her nerves. From the looks of this room, it had served as a portrait room long ago. But now it was close to being overrun with ivy. The plant completely covered two doors and was already spreading high upon the walls and ceiling. Two statues of a man and woman who were missing items from their hands that flanked one of the doors were also in the process of being devoured by ivy.

Moira released her pent-up sigh and it came out as a groan instead. Unless she had an ocean’s worth of plant killer or a good pair of plant shears, there was absolutely nothing she could do here. What had the Frog Prince done here? Had he decided to plant some ivy to honor his princess in here and it had grown utterly rampant? He was lucky he had kept the door to this room shut, otherwise his castle would have been as covered as Briar Rose’s had been with her thorns!

She left the room and exited the castle entirely. Maybe she’ll be able to find something in the greenhouse to help combat the ivy. Barring that, she might find the missing lever hiding somewhere.

The greenhouse did have something for her in its bed of flowers: a flower vial with an orchid floating inside. She only knew what _that_ flower was because orchids were the favorite flowers of her widowed mother and oldest sister. Unfortunately, the greenhouse had nothing else to give her. No matter how hard or where she searched, there were no plant killers or a single pair of shears to be found.

Brushing dirt from her coat, pants, and bag, she stepped outside the greenhouse and let out a cry of alarm as a small tremor rumbled under her feet. Moira grabbed the greenhouse door for support and waited for the shaking to stop. It felt like it had originated from the direction of the palace, but why? What was the Frog Prince doing?

When another tremor didn’t happen again, Moira hesitantly headed for the palace. She looked at the walls and the palace foundation on her way inside. Nothing looked damaged or structurally unsound in the entryway, or even in the antechamber with the statues. Making her way upstairs, even the shattered display case displayed nothing wrong. No new glass shards had fallen, none of the jewels had been scattered.

Upon entry through the double doors though, she felt a stabbing pain in her gut. The alcove had pieces of a key that probably belonged to Cinderella, judging from the tiny slipper and carriage charms attached to the key ring. Moira put the finished key in a coat pocket and looked around her with disgust as the pain in her gut faded. Had the tremor been the realm’s way of telling her there were more items to find? What a cheap way to get her attention.

Downstairs in the library and treasury, there were no signs of damage aside from a few fallen books and scattered jewels. There was a new item to be found on the frog statue though: broken glass pieces that soon fashioned themselves into a glass slipper. It looked delicate enough to shatter the instant some poor woman stood up while wearing it, which gave Moira some unpleasant mental images as she walked to the Cinderella door.

Why did the old tales insist on a glass slipper, anyway? Any common dancing slipper would have been infinitely more comfortable and practical enough to dance in.

&

The door to Cinderella’s shrine had no visible knob. Moira initially thought the lone glass slipper on a pedestal to the door’s left had been for decorative purposes, but it turns out she completely missed the second, empty pedestal on the door’s right. She had discovered it after moving aside more books close to the door. After setting the glass slipper down upon it, the door opened smoothly and soundlessly as if by magic.

She walked inside the room. Her footsteps muted by the plush red carpet leading up to a massive pumpkin-shaped gold carriage positioned in the middle of the room. It took up the most space in here, leaving just enough space for a small end table that was on her left. She wouldn’t be surprised if the carriage had been assembled in here piece by piece, given how small the door was. There was an item to be found inside the carriage, she could feel it, but she ignored it to take in the rest of the room.

There was a set of locked double doors in front of the carriage, with a pair of shoes carved over each door. The key she found earlier would open it. Next to the door was the end table. A plant potion and a lamp were perched on top of it, with a portrait of a woman hanging over them. Moira grabbed the potion and put it away as she looked at the picture.

Cinderella had posed for this intimate portrait while sitting at a small tea table, dressed in a lush purple gown and her dark brown hair pulled away from her face. She looked to be in her thirties when she sat for this painting. She smiled a secret smile, the misery of her servitude a distant memory of her past. Moira couldn’t tell what color her eyes were, but she guessed they might be a warm brown. She wanted to keep looking at the picture, but the angry gnawing in her gut was an unpleasant reminder of what needed to be done. With a small sigh, Moira stepped away from the portrait and went to look inside the carriage, even though she didn’t want to.

The carriage interior was dim, but she could tell place was in utter shambles. The back of the plush seating had been slashed open in two places, a small chest lay overturned on the floor with its contents scattered about, and an orphaned shoe lay next to the chest. It was in this disorganized interior that she found two marble balls that were inset with silver and had minimal jeweled decorations. Each of them was as large and heavy as a cricket ball, and they bulged out of the coat pockets Moira put them in.

She turned her attention to the locked closet next. Taking the key from her pocket, she unlocked the door and opened it. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the brighter lightning inside, but once she did her mouth dropped open in shock.

“Holy shit, I’m so glad my sister isn’t with me to see this.”


	10. Chapter Eight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will probably be the last thing I post for 2019! Happy New Year's, everyone.
> 
> I want to give a shoutout to my friend Melethh for reading the chapter over before I posted it!

Cinderella’s shoe closet was large enough to be called its own room. Two sets of bookshelves lined the walls on either side of Moira, and each had been repurposed to have six shelves each. Shoes filled up each shelf imperfectly; most were complete pairs, while others had a missing pair laying on the floor. A padded bench had been installed between the bookcases, with a small wooden step-ladder positioned nearby. Moira sucked in a breath at the variety of shoes available. Dancing slippers, heeled shoes, shoes of all shapes and sizes decorated with precious gems…

Oh, yes, her sister would die of envy upon seeing this.

She scanned the shelves, careful not to jostle anything. She found a solitary glass slipper on one shelf with a level underneath its heel, and she managed to slide it out without tipping over any shoes. The lever was primarily black, with gold and green accents. It’d be useful upstairs, but not here. Into a pocket it went.

A locked cabinet at the end of the room gave her pause. The top half was lit by two candlesticks, which were positioned on either side of a velvet-lined cushion. A glass slipper – twin to the one she’d found on the shelf most likely – was perched on top of the cushion. The bottom half of the cabinet was a set of double doors that were locked by a single padlock. A key or tool could remove it, but Moira had neither now.

She stepped out of the closet, intending to go back upstairs to return the lever, but she could barely get past the carriage without doubling over in pain. Peering inside the dim, chaotic interior, she managed to piece together another princess crown. Was it Snow White’s or Cinderella’s crown? The jeweled flower motif made it hard to tell. Moira put it on her arm and went back to the ivy-covered portrait room.

There was one important detail she had missed on her first visit: there was a gust of wind coming from beyond what she hoped was a door. The gust was small and barely noticeable, but…

“I can probably get out of here if that’s a door,” she told herself. “I— _ ow _ —wonder if that leads… to where I met the Frog Prince?”

There was no way to test this now; the alcove outside had another item broken onto it and she was straining the limit of how far she could stay away from it. With a defeated sigh, she left the room and crouched down in front of the castle model. Something pointy with a handle had been broken here, and…

_ Wait. Pointy with a handle? _

The pieces were made of stone, but they were delicate to handle. Moira grabbed as many as she could find and assembled them until she had a halberd in front of her. It wasn’t much of a weapon due to its fragility, but she knew of a certain statue who could use it right about now. She picked it up and ran downstairs, jamming the halberd into the stone knight’s hand. The statue moved aside at last, and Moira pushed the door it had been guarding open impatiently.

Suits of armor. Medieval weapons of all kinds. A single room could have been used, but no, the Frog Prince had concerted an entire hall into his own armory. There was a life-size statue of him in full armor at the end of the hall, standing on a dais that had been backed with glass. A metallic stand with a bright pink light shining down on it had been placed in front of the dais. Moira approached the stand with caution, and then cupped a hand around the bright pink light. She withdrew her hand seconds later with a hiss.

How had a  _ laser _ gotten into the fairy tale realms?

…unless it was a magical beam?

But what magic beam could be hot enough to slide her fingers clean off?

She backed away slowly and fled back upstairs. She could deal with this later, when she had the proper tools!

&

The lever went back into its rightful place, and without thinking Moira pushed it up. Her skin under her glove began tingling, which should have been her first warning that something wasn’t right, and the sensation wouldn’t stop until she took her hand off the lever. She then heard a small  _ pop _ , and that was the last coherent thing she remembered before sneezing violently and smacking her forehead on the lever panel in the process.

“Fuck—ow— _ holy shit _ —!”

She grabbed the door for support as she wiped her eyes and tried to think past the pounding pain. She wasn’t bleeding, thank god. But what the hell had that been?

She remembered her hand getting tingly. The map, before exhausting its magic, had given her the same sensation when she held it for the first time in Anne’s office.

Magic. She had encountered magic again. But what had happened here? She looked at the door and almost couldn’t believe her eyes.

_ The ivy was gone _ .

She reached for the door tentatively and closed her fingers around what looked like emptiness. No, the ivy wasn’t completely gone; she could still feel the vines and leaves in her grasp. However, they’d been rendered invisible by some sort of concealment spell she’d inadvertently activated.

Stepping inside the portrait room again, the spell’s presence was heaviest in here. Moira rubbed her arms at the awful tingling she felt. All the ivy was gone, but it didn’t look right. Nothing looked right. There was a waterfall gushing water to her right, and there were portraits lining the walls closest to the ceiling. There  _ was _ a double door between the two statues, but no discernable way to open it. The gust of wind she felt was coming from a thin sliver of a gap between the doors. She reached out and  _ felt _ ivy vines, but she had a feeling that if the door opened, she’d be able to walk through with no problems.

To her left, there was a spot she’d remembered being completely covered with ivy, but the spell had unearthed it. It was a locked door surrounded by golden, gilded vines, and it required a key in the shape of a leaf to open. She put her hand out and once again felt all the ivy covering it, just like the previous door.

These doors could be investigated later. Right now, all Moira wanted to do was leave. She all but ran from the room and pushed the lever down, breathing a sigh of relief as the ivy reappeared. She’d rather dump an ocean’s worth of plant killer into the room and get rid of the ivy that way than use the lever, but it looked like she didn’t have much of a choice. Hopefully it became easier to deal with the next time she walked in there.

What could she do now? The cabinet in Cinderella’s closet was still locked, and she hadn’t found a single key to unlock it during her recent searches. Maybe she could break it with something from the armory? Walking downstairs and entering the hall, she began searching through a pile of objects on the entrance’s right. There was… almost nothing she could use here, though she did see three large scraps of paper among the debris.

Stepping aside, she began rummaging through a stand of weapons to the door’s left next.

There were several halberds she rejected immediately. The sharp pointed ends would only puncture the lock and make it useless, and the tiny axe heads were too thin to make any noticeable dents no matter how hard she hit the lock. There was a strung bow, but no quiver of arrows. After rejecting a lance, her eyes fell upon an axe and she hefted it up. It wasn’t one of those axes with an axe head on both sides of the handle, but the weapon was stout enough to decapitate someone. If she aimed correctly with this, she could possibly break the padlock without shattering the cabinet.

Back in the shoe closet, Moira adjusted her grip on the axe handle and took a few practice swings. How hard should she strike? The padlock sure looked delicate from where she was standing… but before she took her final swing, she relocated the glass slipper and the lit candlesticks to a safer place. The last thing she wanted to do was swing and start a fire.

Standing near the cabinet, she closed her eyes and swung the axe for the final time. She felt like a berserker in one of the video games her brother-in-law played sometimes, striking the axe against an enemy to kill them—

The sound of splintering wood jerked her out of her fantasy. Her eyes flew open and took in the damage she’d just caused.

“ _ SHIT! _ ”

The padlock? Broken. The cabinet doors? Splintered. The axe was stuck inside the carnage. She’d swung too hard. Moira jiggled the weapon furiously, but all she managed to do was tear apart the delicate cabinet door. The axe broke apart and faded to dust, leaving her with the shattered cabinet. She bent and tore the broken pieces away, revealing another picture puzzle of a safe. Miraculously, it had survived unscathed. Moira opened it and took out the papers folded inside.

She was looking at an old military document. Someone had drawn the two statues from the portrait room on it; they were depicted holding two portraits in their hands. One of them looked strikingly like the princess portrait she had found in the treasury and still carried around. But where was the Prince portrait?

She thought of the armory. She’d seen what looked like paper scraps in that one junk pile earlier. But what if those weren’t paper scraps? She ought to look—just in case.

&

She felt a warning stab in her gut the closer she got to the armory. There must be something here, then, most likely in the junk pile. She entered the hall and knelt in front of it. Her eyes hadn’t deceived her after all: the scraps of paper she’d seen initially were the torn pieces of a portrait of the Frog Prince. He looked like his current appearance, but… not depressed. Not as unkempt. Was that a hint of a smile in his features? If Moira was even remotely attracted to men, she’d go as far as calling him handsome here.

Now that she had both portraits, it was time to see if she could escape the cave after all. Speed-walking out of the hall, she raced upstairs and pulled the lever. In her excitement to leave, she barely noticed the tingling in her body as she gave the portraits back to the statues. The door swung open and she bounded through, running right through the invisible ivy curtain like she’d thought she would—

Only to stop abruptly by tripping on a stair and falling flat on her face. She landed hard, her bag a heavy weight on her side as the wind was knocked out of her.

Well, that was one hell of a reality check. After catching her breath, Moira staggered to her feet and looked around.

She was in a long tunnel that sloped upwards. There was a faint light at the top of the staircase. The top of her thighs hurt from where the marble balls had hit her when she’d fallen. Slowly, she walked up the stairs…

…and found herself in the same area where she’d first encountered the Frog Prince up close. The vines were all gone, and so were the rocks. She walked to the middle of the room. Directly in front of her was another set of stairs leading to a rusted gate. She could  _ taste _ the fresh air coming through there.

With zero regard for the cracked, occasionally crumbling staircase, Moira ran up to the gate and fished out the rusted key she’d found in the greenhouse. The padlock snapped off and she all but shoved the gate open. She climbed out of the boulder next to the Frog Prince’s cottage and sat down on the ground, heaving huge lungfuls of air. God, it felt wonderful to be outside after being trapped underground for so long. Hours? It felt like hours. Her head hurt thinking about it.

Once she gathered her bearings and let her eyes adjust, she stood up despite her headache. She spotted the hole she’d fallen through and shuddered. She turned her attention to the cottage next. It was still in its same, dilapidated state, but thick vines had sprouted up from under the porch and blocked access to the front door. She carefully walked up the porch steps and investigated the opened window.

Nothing had changed inside, and there were no signs of the Frog Prince. There were, however, pieces of wood that hadn’t been here the last time she’d been here. The source of her headache: a small hammer.

What else would she find out here? Crawling from the porch, Moira didn’t stand up until she was well clear of the hole. Maybe the lake island had something for the vines?

Hopefully.

&

If the Frog Prince saw her now, he’d think she looked ridiculous. Here she was, crying by the lake, cradling a machete in her arms like she’d been reunited with her long-lost child. 

This was more than she could ever hope for when it came to the vines.

“Realm… if you’re listening…  _ thank you _ …” she sobbed.

With a final, heaving sniffle, she wiped her eyes and nose and stood up. She wanted to use the machete  _ now _ and rescue Marie and her bodyguard, but she had to explore the rest of the forest first. There could be other things around that she might need later.

Walking away from the lake, she went down the long path away from the cottage. The frogs and toads were still hair-raisingly numerous on the road, but they hopped away at her approach. She walked until she reached the cliff edge and felt nothing out of the ordinary. She backtracked her steps and continued walking south until she abruptly gasped in pain near the log.

Kneeling in front of the brightly lit lamp, Moira gathered up the pieces of what became her fifth elemental jar. There was no room in her bag for this… but she felt that she wouldn’t need it. Standing up, she went to the hollowed-out tree. There were five spaces… and she had five jars…

Ice. Earth. Fire. Wind. Water.

When the jars were assembled correctly, a small portcullis she hadn’t noticed before opened. Hiding behind the covered doors was a gold metal plating in the shape of a frog. It was a whimsical, cute design that fit perfectly in the palm of her hand.

Before setting off for the cottage again, Moira sat down and transferred all but one of the items from her coat into the bag. It had been stretched to capacity while holding most of the elemental jars, and some of its seams were ripping open. Hopefully, she could make it last for the rest of this case and  _ maybe _ one more if she fixed the damages done.

She also took a little time to update her journal. Brief, short entries described the portrait room, the two statues, and her escape from the castle. But her thoughts were too preoccupied with rescuing Marie and her bodyguard to elaborate on the entries. Finishing a sentence off with a flourish of her pen, she stuck the journal into the bag and set off. With the machete at her side, she felt like she could take on anything.

Unfortunately, it broke within a few hefty swings when tackling the vines. She chalked it up to being overly excited at unlocking the cottage at last. Tearing away the remains of the vines, she reached into her coat and unbuttoned the interior pocket on her chest. She took the cottage key out and unlocked the door.

It opened inward with a loud squeal of its hinges.


	11. Chapter Nine

The inside of the cottage was as bad – no, _worse_ – as the outside. The room in front of her was in complete and utter disarray. A thick layer of dust coated every available surface, windows were boarded from the inside with rotting wood, wallpaper was peeling from the walls, and a hole had been smashed in the warped floorboards. A lumpy couch near the window was littered with old and decayed objects. The protective glass doors covering a bookcase along the back wall had been smashed open. Cobwebs were spun on every corner and on furniture. Moira tried to avoid touching them as she carefully made her way to a strange piece of furniture next to the bookcase. It’d be awful to get an allergic reaction right now.

The furniture had the appearance of a podium set into a wall, but the breeze she felt coming from it indicated this was a door to somewhere. Marie and her bodyguard were likely being held behind here, but how could it be opened? Moira bent down and squinted at two blocks of wood in the middle of the podium.

“The… Con… Conjuring Frog?” she read out loud. Her eyes looked at the next block. “The… Trick Frog. Trick? Trickster?”

She had to find two figurines, probably. Neither of them could possibly be in this dump heap of a house, so she left the cottage. She followed the cramping in her gut to the lake, where she assembled a whimsical frog statue. The amphibian had been dressed like a jester, holding a trumpet. Maybe this was the Trickster frog she was supposed to find? If it wasn’t so heavy to hold, it’d make a great toy for her youngest niece to play with.

None of the other locations where she’d found items previously gave her indications something new need to be found. Dejected, Moira headed to the cliff. There was nothing to be found, but the view below was nice. She could have a small breather before confronting the Frog Prince.

The lantern still hung from a tree branch, swinging wildly in the gusty breeze that had abruptly picked up. Moira put her hand on the tree to steady herself while she looked down at the town beyond the veil, but what she felt under her gloved hand wasn’t tree bark. The lock she’d found early in her investigation was still there, because at the time she hadn’t had anything to unlock with it.

… or did she?

The lock needed two circular objects to open. She’d assumed the keys would be emblems, but the insets were set too deep to accommodate a standard emblem. Opening her bag, she took out the two marbles and put one in each hand. Would these work as the keys? She pushed a marble into an inset, hearing it click. Emboldened by this success, she put the other one in, and watched the lock open.

The lock was hiding a tree hollow. Someone had carved it extremely deep into the tree and shoved something too far back to distinguish what it was. Moira had to use the lantern’s light to find out she was looking at a scrap of paper. Her arms were too short to reach it, and she had nothing on her to manually reach for it. Maybe the cottage did?

She retraced her steps and went back inside the house. Poking around the chaotic debris, she eventually found a pair of tongs that was on its last legs beneath a moth-eaten blanket. It was probably good enough to grab the paper, but not much else.

Back at the cliff, the tongs managed to grab the paper and pull it closer, but they broke before Moira could dislodge the paper entirely. She reached into the hollow and pulled the paper out the rest of the way in one piece. She smoothed it out on the tree bark and squinted at what was drawn on it in the lamp light.

Lines. Drawing of a house. Was this a blueprint of the cottage? It had to be; it showed the existence of a secret staircase that led deeper into the cottage. Moira carefully folded the blueprint up and stuck it into her journal. This was a valuable piece of evidence, probably the best one she’d found so far. The German branch of the Fairytale division would probably love this.

She walked back to the cottage, unsure of what to do next. She knew she had to find the other frog figurine, but _where_ would she find it?

The inside of the cottage gave her an unpleasant welcome the second she walked back in. An item? Here? Moira staggered over to the couch. There were plenty of broken things on here. There were no cobwebs here, thankfully, but the dust was plentiful enough to make her sneeze. Slowly, she sifted through the debris to assemble a second frog figurine, one that was dressed as a wizard.

Conjuring frog and trickster frog. The wizard frog and the jester frog?

Moira put the frogs on the podium and let out a sigh of relief as the door opened by sliding into a wall. There was a tall, spiraling staircase leading up to the second floor of the house, just as the blueprints implied. She cautiously began walking up, the old wood groaning under her feet.

She was not prepared for the sight that greeted her.

&

“…Marie? Marie’s bodyguard? Oh, fuck. Shit! _Shit!_”

The room wasn’t very large, and it was made smaller by two enormous glass topped chambers in the middle of the space. The chambers were filled with a strange green liquid, and inside each one a large frog swam around frantically as if trying to escape.

Her worst fears were confirmed: not only had Marie and her bodyguard been turned into frogs. Moira kicked herself for wasting the potion she’d found earlier on the pig. She tapped gently on the glass of one of the chambers, but this made the frog inside swim away from her.

_What am I going to do?_ She thought frantically.

She sank to the floor. Breaking the glass with the hammer was her first thought, and the easiest thought, but the hammer head was too small. Plus, there was no telling what the green liquid really was if the glass did break and it splashed all over her. She’d be of no use if the liquid was corrosive, because dead detectives can’t solve cases.

Her eyes focused on a strange indent on a box between the two chambers. Pipes churning the green liquid into the chambers came from the box. The indent was flower-ish shaped. If a key in the shape of that existed… it could probably stop the flow of the liquid or drain the chambers empty, enabling her to safely get the frogs out.

Moira got to her feet, intending to leave the cottage and start looking for the key, but an abrupt headache made her sway. Maybe she stood up too quickly. She waited for any sign of dizziness to pass, but her head still hurt like a bitch. Going downstairs, the headache worsened. On the couch were large… bright to dark green shards of… something. Some gems too. She picked them up and picked more things up until she held an ivy-shaped key in her hands.

The shape looked familiar, but she couldn’t dwell on its significance because her headache was still present. It wasn’t as bad as it was upstairs, but it still hurt. She stumbled outside onto the porch and knelt in front of the open window. She never recalled seeing rose petals or a rose stem among the clutter in the window… but she had been finding other items here in the past.

The headache seemed to dissipate the more item fragments she found on the windowsill, and it had disappeared entirely by the time the rose flower potion had been assembled from the fragments. The potion looked exactly like the one Moira had used to wake Briar Rose up with but on a much smaller scale. However, the liquid inside the vial was a shade or two darker than the potion.

But the vial wasn’t what she wanted to focus on right now. She pulled out the key and looked at it. She recalled seeing something with the key’s shape back in the palace, but where? In her excitement to leave the palace behind, she’d forgotten. Grabbing a part of the porch railing not covered in cobwebs for support, she hauled herself to her feet and went back into the tunnel.

The portrait room still had the concealment spell activated. It had not gotten easier to deal with the third time around. Moira rubbed her arms vigorously to get rid of the tingling sensation crawling on her skin and looked around. The waterfall and the fountain on the floor still gushed water. The door to her right was still locked.

… locked?

She went up to the door and looked at the lock closely. The gold-shaped indent needed a key in the shape of an ivy leaf to open. The object she pulled out of her bag seemed too large, too jeweled, too thick to be used as a key. After a few minutes of internal debate, she pushed the object into the lock. No more doubts now, not when the rescue mission became personal.

The door swung open. Moira walked into a small bedroom and released a pent-up breath. The concealment spell didn’t expand into this room. Judging from the décor, this room probably belonged to Princess Ivy. The walls were a soft blue color, the same color as the bedsheets on a bed to Moira’s right. A large floral mural had been carved into the wall behind the bed. There was a small fountain carved into the floor in front of Moira’s feet. Aside from a small bookcase and a vanity, there was no other furniture.

She walked around the fountain and bent down in front of the vanity. A panel had a strange carving etched into it: a weird v-shaped oval with legs. She dug through her bags and took out the gold metal frog. Same size, same shape. The frog was pushed into the carving. Moira expected the panel in front of her would slide open, but no. The vanity’s mirror slid open instead.

Behind the mirror was a small black statue of a woman clad in robes. She clutched a common gold key in her arms. Moira extracted the key gently and put it in her coat pocket, puzzled. This wasn’t the key she needed to free Marie and her bodyguard. What did it open?

&

Outside of the portrait room, Moira pulled the lever down and watched the ivy reappear with a small hiss of pain. There was an item nearby downstairs, either in the treasury or in the display case. Probably the latter, given her proximity to it. Before leaving, she updated her journal.

_Found Marie and her bodyguard, they’ve been turned to frogs. Don’t have any more transformation potion to change them back, so…_

She paused writing. What would she put?

_So, I must fight the Frog Prince._

She crossed out a word.

_So, I must <strike>fight</strike> find the Frog Prince and convince him to help me._

Better, though she wasn't sure how she'd convince him to help her or ask him for help when she couldn't locate him anywhere.

Downstairs, she stopped at the display case. Aside from pieces of a black circle that had been broken into quarters, she didn’t know what she was trying to find and assemble. She picked up random jewels and other circular objects until an emblem – a large silver flower etched into an onyx and silver background – had been formed. The emblem was larger than what she was used to dealing with, being as large as one of her mother’s antique dinner plates. The only place she could think to put it was back upstairs in the fountain.

Upstairs, she put the emblem into the hole at the bottom of the fountain. This hadn’t been a thing she’d paid attention to at all – some empty circular things were usually empty for aesthetic reasons! As the emblem was pushed in, a panel opened in the wall next to her.

The puzzle was one she didn’t recognize until she began playing with it. She had to move a needle using dials until it matched up to a shape… but the dials were each set to move a specific number of spaces both forwards and backwards. Moira pulled at the first dial she saw and jumped when three sets of boxes with arrows and number one through seven appeared. These must be what moves the needle, then…

When she finally managed to get the needle lined up with a star-shaped drawing – and solved it _twice_ because the Frog Prince apparently wanted her to linger a bit – the door opened. The room beyond was shaped like a sphere and had no ceiling. A huge, gnarled tree covered in moss grew in the middle of the room, and it stretched up all the way to the cave entrance. Underneath some of its roots was a spindly gold cage that held something glowing. Moira took the hammer she found and smashed the gate open.

The object turned out to be a massive glass orb. The surface had been etched with solid lines, and a blue-green light shone within. Moira carefully picked it up and set it down gently in her bag. She could deal with this after investigating the door next to the tree.

The door was made of old wood and decorated with a brick archway. An inscription carved into the door read: _Rise to the challenge, only the worthy shall venture beyond this door_. Next to the door was a marble stand with a tree engraved inside of a blackened, empty slot. The tree looked familiar…

Moira dug through her bag until she pulled out the tree disc she’d found in Ivy’s tomb. She stuck the disc inside and watched the door open on its own. She was worthy to enter! All because she had the correct key.

The room was another dedication to the wives of the Frog Prince. Portraits of four of them hung on the walls, each of them depicted holding what Moira suspected was the Frog Prince in his amphibian form. A plaque had been nailed underneath each painting. They were, well… _sappy_ wasn’t the right word. The epitaphs spoke of how each wife had affected the Frog Prince positively, or how he’d always treasure the life they spent together.

Okay, maybe they were a little sappy. The Frog Prince really did love almost all his wives.

Almost, because Snow White’s plaque and portrait – which was more of an unfinished engraving than a full colored painting – was so crusted and glazed over with ice that whatever words were on there were impossible to read.

Moira went to take a closer look at them but yelped as an apparition appeared.

This was… not Princess Ivy. The apparition looked too solid to be a ghost, and she bore a startling resemblance to—

“Snow White?” Moira whispered.

The apparition – or was it a magical projection? – disappeared and did not appear again despite her name being called out more than once.

“I’m willing to pay a substantial amount of money to prove Snow White’s still alive,” Moira muttered. “I don’t know how all of these ice motifs factor into this, but I’m going to find out sooner or later.”

There was no point in staying in this room after that encounter. Moira left, but not before writing down the wives’ names in the order their portraits appeared. She was going to have to make a makeshift family tree at some point when she got back to headquarters, if she was given enough space to work. Her tiny and barely used desk wasn’t going to be big enough to hold what she had planned.

&

She stood in the armory, holding the glass orb in her hands. This was the final, most conceivable place to put it. The pink light still burned hot on the stand. She stood in front of the prince statue and very, very slowly pushed the orb under the light.

The pink light hit the orb and shot a beam of light at one of the shields. The heat burnt off the decoration, revealing a rectangular shaped black space. It looked like something she could put the mirror she found a long time ago into.

Moira got down onto the floor and crawled toward the shield. She withdrew the mirror from her bag and carefully edged it into the slot. The light shot a third beam up toward the ceiling, where it hovered on a large oval-shaped frame.

_Did I forget a mirror somewhere? Fuck!_

She wracked her brain, trying to remember where she may have seen a rounded mirror. After a while, her brain settled on Snow White’s cottage-shrine. The hidden room in there had a ton of mirrors on its walls. It wouldn’t hurt anyone if she just took one of them, right?

Moira crawled on her stomach on the armory floor, inching towards the door at a snail’s pace. She didn’t dare get to her feet until she was beyond the door’s threshold. Once she was able to stand, she raced out of the castle toward Snow White’s cottage-shrine and skidded to a stop inside the secret room. As she caught her breath, something caught her eye. One of the standing mirrors had a second, rounded mirror in its own frame toward the top.

She grabbed the small mirror with both hands and tugged gently. The frame wouldn’t budge, but the mirror it held popped out. Moira caught it before it fell to the ground. So, this was what she needed? She raced back to the armory, where she had to get creative getting the mirror into the oval frame. She moved several crates of weapons out of the way, used the step ladder from Cinderella’s shoe room to reach the back of the frame, and put the mirror inside of it reflective side out so it faced the shields. The last thing she wanted was to get hit in the face with whatever that light was. A finger, she could stand to lose. Her face? Not so much.

The light beam hit the mirror and aimed itself at the wall. A piece of the stone wall was burnt, its ashes revealing a keyhole. Moira stepped down from the ladder and crawled toward the keyhole. She took the gold key she found and lifted her arm up, maneuvering past the hot light to stick the key into the keyhole and turn it. When she heard a lock click, the wall in front of her slid open.

Hidden deep inside a secret compartment was a gnarled piece of wood. Moira lowered her arm and crawled over to it, sliding it toward her. The wood was grey with immense age; the top half had been carved into elaborate swirls and decorations and topped with an amethyst, the bottom half was smooth and void of decoration. It was small enough to use with one hand. The longer Moira held it, the more a long-buried thought burrowed its way to the surface.

She’d seen the notes scattered around the castle that referenced the Ancient Wand. She had dismissed them outright throughout her investigation, thinking they spoke of a relic that had been lost a long time ago.

Was this truly the Ancient Wand the notes spoke of?

If so, shit.


	12. Chapter Ten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably the longest chapter I've written for this story - seven pages! This is the final "game" chapter, but I will be doing a chapter on the bonus game and then wrap everything up with one to three epilogue chapters, depending on how things go.
> 
> Most of the dialogue is lifted verbatim from the game, except in places where I didn't want to include it (the majority of James and Ivy's speeches at the end, for example) or I expanded upon (the conversation with Marie about Snow White's appearance).

The first thing Moira wanted to do was go back and reread all the notes that mentioned the Ancient Wand. But she couldn’t leave the armory. Turning around, she crawled back to the weapon crates she’d moved around earlier and sat up when she was away from the light beams. She hadn’t been very gentle with the crates she’d been moving and had heard several delicate items get smashed to pieces. The item she must be looking for was probably among the broken ones.

Something smelled… _floral_ the whole time she picked up prospective pieces, which gave her a hint as to what the item probably was. Why the Frog Prince would hide a flower potion in a weapon crate was a mystery, unless he someone managed to create a Molotov cocktail out of perfume.

Still, she had six potions now. Did they go into that strange machine in the greenhouse? It wouldn’t hurt to test the theory out later, but the wand came first. Moira crawled out of the armory and went to the first location she could think of that mentioned the wand: the treasury. The handwritten note was still high up on the pillar. She stood on her tiptoes and tried to read it again, her head pounding from a headache and her eyes squinted against the light.

“When… Ancient Wand… is on? Pour potion… it shall be imbued… mortal effect.”

As she recited, she wrote down the words in her journal so she wouldn’t forget. She then mentally kicked herself for not taking the note seriously. She had the wand in her very hands! Something was bound to happen when she used it with the potion that could end any curse, if she could either find or create such a thing.

After putting the journal away, she stumbled over to the frog statue. There were green pieces and gems on here, some indistinguishable from the curling ivy vines surrounding the statue or on the gold of the frog’s crown. The princess tiara she assembled was different than the others she’d collected so far. Instead of silver, it was predominantly forged from bronze. Tiny blue flowers and ivy leaves had been set into the swirls and curls of the bronze work, and the tiara was lightly accented with small sapphires and pearls. Ivy leaves? This belonged to Princess Ivy.

Moira gingerly added the tiara to her arm and rubbed her temple, glad to be rid of the headache. She had a full set of crowns now, and she could go see what the box that contained them held at the Princess Shrine after she dealt with the business in the greenhouse. Hopefully the lab inside of there had instructions or a recipe for the curse-breaking potion.

The laboratory had one useful thing that she had unfortunately overlooked and not paid any mind to: another note on the Ancient Wand, which spoke of its potent magical properties. _Potent magical properties_ felt like a bit of a stretch, because the wand currently jostling around in her bag looked and felt like a piece of old wood. She had felt zero magic emitting from it. Perhaps that would change in the future, but right now… no.

She went through the side door and sat down in front of the machine. The laboratory had given her nothing in terms of potion making, not even a recipe to go by, so this… mixing machine was going to suffice for now. She took out the vials and lined them up in front of her. On closer inspection, the spaces between the shelves was the perfect height to slide the vials into. She selected the rose vial first and slid it into the first slot, and then added the other five into the other slots at random. She pulled the pull cord.

The machine didn’t respond.

Moira rearranged the vials again and pulled the cord. Slot number one lit up, which had the white flower. The others must still be out of order. As she rearranged those and kept pulling the cord, her mind went to that note laying nearby. It spoke of needing six exotic plants to make this curse breaking potion. But here she was with six flower potions, containing flowers she could easily find at home at a florist’s shop. Maybe these six flowers were the exotic species of the fairytale realms, whose seeds were difficult to find and expensive to buy. That put things into perspective a little.

The first four slots were now lit up. She swapped the last two vials and pulled the cord for the last time. It strained under her hand from excessive tugging. The mixer shook violently and smoked as the liquids from the vials were extracted and then mixed. Moira backed away from it, worried it might overheat and explode. Just as she considered getting up and running out of the greenhouse, the machine stopped moving and its smoke dissipated. She hesitantly crawled up to it and pulled out the vial the mixed potion had been poured into.

It was about the height of her palm. The potion inside was syrupy and thick and a blue-purple color that reminded her of a dusky twilight. So, this tiny thing could break any curse? If the note in the treasury was correct, she had to pour all this liquid over the wand… but presently it looked like there was barely any liquid inside.

_Stranger things can and do happen._ Moira thought to herself. She carefully slipped the potion into her interior coat pocket and left the greenhouse.

&

On her way to the Princess Shrine, she felt the slightest hint of a tug under her navel coming from Snow White’s cottage-shrine, but she ignored it for now. She could go back when the crowns were placed, barring any ghostly appearances.

The box to hold the crowns wasn’t very deep, it was more of a square platform with large plush cushions that surrounded a statue of a frog. Moira removed the crowns one at a time from her arms and placed them on their respective cushions. The crown with the rubies did in fact belong to Snow White, if the ruby-red apple sewn on her crown’s cushion was any indication. When the last two crowns had been placed, Moira stepped back.

She expected the box to open and reveal something, but nothing of that sort happened. The Transmutation Circle, however, changed. Words in an unknown language were now etched upon the outer circle, and they glowed a putrid yellow green. A keyhole appeared inside the innermost circle in the middle of the triangle, awaiting a key to be inserted.

A key Moira did not have presently.

_So that’s why I felt that tug earlier!_

She bolted out of the area and ran toward the cottage-shrine, skidding to a stop in front of the raised beir. Hidden deep inside the flowers filling the coffin were pieces of the key for the newly awakened Transmutation Circle. The finished key was mostly… normal size, as normal of a size as keys can get, except this one had an extra-large topper that featured a marble miniature of… someone. It was hard to tell if the subject was a man or a woman and who they were supposed to represent. But that didn’t matter now, she had the key.

Moira ran back to the shrine and stuck the key into the keyhole. The Transmutation Circle turned out to be a lid of some sorts, lifting off easily from the ground. It concealed a rounded stand covered in decorative swirling. A small circle in the very middle was the perfect size for the wand base, which she jammed inside. She took the potion out and broke the seal to open it. A pungent floral smell assaulted her nose and she held it away from her face.

It still looked too small to cover the wand. Still…

With shaking hands, she spilled the potion onto the wand. It fell onto the wood, but most of the liquid splashed thickly onto the curled decorative surface below. It began glowing very, very brightly when the liquid seeped into the deep groves. The wand seemed to come alive then, thrumming with power and new life. When the glowing didn’t fade or dim and remained stationary, Moira reached out and grabbed the wand.

All hell broke loose at that very moment.

A cloak of blackened mist appeared not far from Moira’s left, and the Frog Prince stepped out of it next to the agate and emerald goblets. The hood of his tattered cloak was still pulled over his face. Moira lifted the wand, which pulsed with enough magic to make the hands holding it tingle unpleasantly and pointed it at him just as the Frog Prince pointed at her. If he was going to use magic, then she could at least fight back with magic of her own. Equal footing, at least, even though Moira knew nothing about using this wand. It was just a matter of who was going to make the first shot.

“Detective, this has gone on long enough. I am putting an end to this now.”

“Gone on long enough?!” Moira exclaimed. “_You_ started this whole bloody debacle by kidnapping the Chancellor’s daughter and her bodyguard! When I came here to rescue them, you decided to trap me underground, giving me access to both your palace and the tools I needed to finish what you started: ending your curse. If you had wanted to _put an end to this now_, you should have tried harder to stop me earlier! It’s almost like you don’t want your curse to be broken!”

She took a deep breath and stepped forward. The Frog Prince looked ready to give her a scathing reply of his own. Before he could, Princess ivy materialized between them and she moved to the Frog Prince’s side. Moira considered taking her tape recorder out, but she needed to keep both hands on the wand.

“James, I am here. Please let it go.”

_The Prince’s name is James. I’ll have to remember that for later._ Moira thought.

James’s reply to Ivy and parts of Ivy’s next statement were nearly indecipherable to Moira; her heart was beating too loudly in her chest and James had partially covered his face with his hands. But she caught the last part of Ivy’s words.

“—I stand beside you in life and death.”

Well, that was touching. James’s whole demeanor seemed to change then; all the tension left his body and he reached up to push the hood of his cloak back. When he spoke to Moira again, his tone was more subdued and resigned.

“My curse is immortality—seeing everyone I love die. You now hold the Immortal Wand, Detective. Please, put an end to my suffering.”

All of Moira’s fiery anger evaporated, splashed out by a bucket of icy water. She renewed her grip on the wand—the Immortal Wand, apparently—but her arms shook violently at the weight of James’s final request.

She had killed before, deliberately and without hesitation. The Dalimars had callously and gleefully delighted in her capture and they had gloated over the thought of keeping her in their fucked-up family forever. Their fiery deaths were the most appropriate demise she could give them while simultaneously getting vengeance for Emma, Rose, and Rose’s twin daughters.

But being _asked_ by someone to end their life… she didn’t hate James. She hadn’t wished death upon him once. She just wanted some answers for his behavior. This was too much. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, but she couldn’t lower her arms. They were either being held in place by the wand or they were too tensed up. She tried relaxing her arms. It didn’t work.

“Prince James—Your Majesty—” she began with a slight tremor in her voice. “What about the Chancellor’s daughter and her bodyguard? Are you able to restore them back to their human forms?” She took a step forward. James looked like he wasn’t listening. Ivy looked at her, a silent plea etched on her face. “Can you—_NO!_”

Her arms moved, and the wand’s power awakened. A yellow beam of magic shot at James, and his body became engulfed in light as his curse was lifted. His now mortal body crumbled into a black mist as the wand finally fell from Moira’s hands. The mist fell to the ground like fine sand, forming the body of a massive green frog. James’s ghost appeared over the frog a few seconds later, standing next to Ivy. He looked at his new form with wonderment and joy.

Moira couldn’t share any of it. Her arms shook with weariness. Why had they moved? Was it because she forced her body to relax? Had Ivy done it? She didn’t want to contemplate this at all. She hadn’t wanted to do this.

James was talking, but she was too numb to hear him. She jolted back to reality when something was tossed to her feet and it hit her ankle.

“The curse is undone—the transformed frogs have reverted back to humans. Take the Prince’s locket and free the Chancellor’s daughter,” Ivy said. Moira bent down and picked up the very key to the chambers Marie and her bodyguard were imprisoned in. It didn’t _look_ like a locket. “Thank you and goodbye, Detective.”

James and Ivy vanished. Moira looked at the key, then at the wand on the ground. Her final question to James was now irrelevant if what Ivy said was true. Her mind was in turmoil. She bent down to pick up the wand, but she drew back with a hiss as it crumbled to dust. So, the relic truly was lost now.

Dusting her gloves off, Moira walked over to the frog’s body and sat down in front of him. She put the key in a pocket and reached out to gingerly stroke the amphibian’s skin. Despite the frog’s enormous size, death made it—smaller.

“I’m still a little mad at you, James,” she began. “You’re gone and dead and hopefully happy, but I have to clean up the mess you left behind. And I never did get an apology for you trapping me down here. But… I’ll let it go. I didn’t want to kill you, but I hope you’re finally at peace.”

She stood up. Rescuing Marie and her bodyguard should be her next step, but she didn’t want to leave James’s frog form where it lay. He didn’t deserve that.

She found a small patch of earth underneath a large, loose cobblestone and used both her hands and a large shard of the green rock to dig a hole large and deep enough to safely accommodate the frog’s enormous bulk. Dusting her gloves free of dirt, Moira gently lifted the frog up and placed him into the hole. She covered him up with the earth and then covered the disturbed area with the cobblestone.

It wasn’t the most magnificent of burials, but at least James was buried in front of the shrine that depicted all his wives.

She imagined he would appreciate that.

&

With James buried, Moira put her conflicted feelings over his death aside and raced back to the cottage, taking the secret passage through the castle to reach it. She wasn’t ready to see if Ivy’s prediction about the curse being reversed proved true just yet. She didn’t want to get held up by a mob of people now.

Once inside the derelict cottage, she pounded up the secret passage staircase and ran up to the room at the top. Both Marie and her bodyguard had been turned back into humans, but they were close to drowning in the green liquid. Moira took the key out and slammed it into the lock.

She thought the liquid would drain, but no.

There was a godforsaken puzzle behind the lock.

_I take back what I said. James, I AM PISSED AT YOU._

It was a rotating puzzle; aligning each shape and color with each other by rotating their positions on the board. Moira’s anger and frustration while slamming the buttons almost broke the puzzle, but she heaved a sigh of relief when it was solved and finally, _finally_ the liquid drained.

Marie and her bodyguard, naked and shivering violently, heaved the tops of their sealed chambers off. Before they could stand up, Moira gestured wildly for them to sit.

“Both of you, _stay in there_ and do not attempt to get out,” she ordered. “I’m going to find you blankets and some clothes.”

The vigorous nodding from both individuals was all she needed to turn around and run back to the palace. Getting anything from downstairs was simply not an option, she didn’t want to spend hours beating the dust from them.

Once inside the palace proper, Moira tore through every open room she could physically enter and grabbed any and all blankets and clothing she could fit into her arms. If hardly any of them fit, it didn’t matter. Marie and her bodyguard were _not_ walking out of this realm naked under her watch. Once she felt like she’d grabbed enough, she ran back to the room and dumped her findings on the thankfully clean floor.

She tossed blankets to Marie, then the bodyguard, and helped them climb out of the tanks to get dressed after they’d vigorously dried themselves off as dry as possible. She turned around to give them some privacy while they selected clothes and changed.

“You can turn around now,” one of them said. Moira did.

Marie and her bodyguard were dressed in wildly mismatched clothes that were either too large or too small for them, but at least they were clothed. Marie grabbed a new blanket from the floor and began rubbing her hair dry.

“Thank you for saving us,” she began. “Before you came, a person dressed in white appeared in the room.”

Moira immediately grabbed her journal and opened to a new page.

“Go on. Tell me what you remember from the encounter.”

Marie tossed the blanket aside.

“It… was a woman. She was so close to the glass of my tank that I could see her eyes – her stare was colder than ice,” she began. The bodyguard nodded in corroboration. “The woman whispered madly about… I think some snow kingdom and the end of the world. I don’t know how I could hear her, but I did.”

“What did she look like beyond the white clothing?” Moira asked. She scribbled furiously in her journal.

“She had white hair and pale skin. I couldn’t see her eye color very well,” Marie replied. “But when she touched the glass, ice began forming under her palm and—it began spreading.”

“Okay—”

“But I don’t care about what it means. I just want to go _home_.” Marie interrupted. Moira put her journal back in her bag and squeezed Marie’s shoulder.

“I’m going to get you home, I promise. But I’m going to need you and your bodyguard’s help,” Moira stated. “The Frog Prince—that’s who kidnapped you—has turned other people into frogs in the past, and they’ve all been restored back to humans like you two have. If we run into any on the way out of here…” She trailed off for a second. “I don’t speak German very well, so I’ll need help telling everyone that it’s safe and… and that there’s an underground castle they can live in or they can leave the area entirely.”

Both Marie and her bodyguard nodded slowly. The bodyguard spoke up for the first time.

“We—we can manage it,” he said. “But can we rest before we leave? This ordeal has been—trying.”

Moira mulled over his request and nodded. With both the bodyguard and Marie resting, she could get the piglet and reinvestigate Ivy’s tomb. She was curious about the wall of ice and wondered if it was connected to the appearance of the woman Marie met.

“Sleep up here. It’s too nasty to sleep downstairs,” she said. Marie made a disgusted face and nodded in agreement. “I’ll come back for you in a little while.”

With the agreement made, Moira went back downstairs and left the cottage. There were no people gathered outside – yet. She climbed into the tunnel and set off for Ivy’s tomb.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will probably be the last chapter for a while, as school has started up again and I'm overwhelmed with the amount of work I have to go to stay on top of things. I shouldn't be too surprised, as this is the last class I have to take before graduating from college! Things will be a little slow for the next couple of months, so I thought I'd give a heads-up.
> 
> I can be contacted on my Tumblr (fallenidol-453) if any of you have questions or simply want to talk to me on another platform. Both my AO3 and Tumblr accounts have the same Princess Tutu icon.


	13. Bonus Chapter I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is 11 pages in Word, so I'll be splitting up in two. Writing this was a little odd, since I wrote it out long hand like I usually do, but I was at the mercy of the Youtuber whose Let's Play of The Exiled Prince bonus chapter I was watching to write this chapter out!
> 
> I'm still on my hiatus, but school is going better than I expected. Depending on how my assignments for next week pan out, I might be able to continue writing the epilogue chapter(s).

Princess Ivy’s tomb was the same as Moira left it what felt like a lifetime ago. The only new thing she noticed was the drop in temperature from the wall of ice. Funny how she hadn’t noticed it before when she’d come in here for the first time. She approached ivy’s coffin, only to abruptly back up and cover her eyes as a flash of white light lit the room up. Blinking rapidly, she watched through the gap of her fingers as Prince James’s ghost materialized in front of her.

“Prince James? What’s going on?” Moira asked. Had he come to thank her for burying him?

“I’ll use my power to break down this barrier,” James announced. “Beyond this passage, you’ll find clues to your next investigation.”

“What do you mean, _next_ investigation?” she exclaimed. “James, wait! I just wanted to—”

A ball of blue light materialized in James’s hand, and his ghost disappeared into it as the light shot out and collided with the ice wall. Moira dove to the ground behind Ivy’s coffin and covered her head and ears as the ice cracked. She shrieked as the cave’s foundation rumbled violently and the ice wall disintegrated. Shards and fragments exploded outward, covering the tomb floor in front of the coffin. Some of them skidded across the top and landed on her.

She didn’t try get up until the shaking stopped.

_Jesus Christ, James! Are you trying to kill me?_ Moira mentally screamed.

She uncovered her head and rolled onto her side. The ice shards that had landed on her slid off her coat and fell to the floor with a faint, strange ringing noise. She sat up and looked over at where the wall used to be.

There was a set of double doors there now, carved from marble. Their blue color was probably a side effect of the ice wall. Moira stood up and swept her arm across the top of ivy’s coffin to clear the ice off. One of the doors opened on its own, sending forth a blast of cold air that made her chilled to her bones. She hoped the room beyond wasn’t carved from ice or covered in snow, because her coat and clothes were not made for winter weather of any form.

After making a note of what happened in her journal, she made her way to the opened door. She kicked aside piles of ice in her wake, forming a mostly bare pathway.

None of the ice was melting.

&

The long hallway she found herself in was styled with dark green and gold. A massive chandelier lit with candles hung from the ceiling, showcasing the gold leaf on the ceiling and the gold statue of an embracing Snow White and Prince James. A closed door to the right had a glass arch with snowflakes carved into it. Her head began to hurt from the light gleaming off all the gold, and she knelt by a large vase of white flowers to rest her eyes.

She bent down to smell a couple of the flowers, and promptly dislodged both a pincushion and two spools of thread. They dropped to the floor by her knees, the thread rolling away until it hit the opposite wall.

“The fuck? Who hides sewing supplies inside of a flowerpot?” Moira said. She picked up the pincushion and thread, spinning the loose threads back onto their respective spools before putting them in her pocket. “Unless… fuck. I thought I was _done_ with finding things.”

She put her discoveries aside and attacked the flowerpot with a vengeance. Loose earth and petals went flying as she pushed aside flowers and assorted knickknacks to find the rest of the sewing kit. When she was done, she had a small wooden box filled with basic sewing supplies that barely fit inside one of her coat pockets. When she stood up to stretch the kinks out of her back, she noticed something else.

A tiny key, hanging from the chandelier. It, alas, was too high for Moira to reach.

“Really, James? I just wanted to know more about Snow White, but you’re not making this easy for me!”

Moira walked past the statue and headed toward the end of the hallway. A locked gate prevented her from passing through. Worse, the gate shutter had been frozen with a block of ice. Given the perfectly square shape of the ice block, the gate shutter had probably been frozen deliberately.

_If I had a crowbar and some rope, I could twist the bars of that gate open._ Moira thought. _But no, I have neither of those._

She turned around and went to take a closer look at the statue. There was a small set of chains by the statue base that she picked up and stowed away; they looked like the chains used to lock up the greenhouse initially, just on a smaller scale. The next time of interest was a wooden puzzle box that had been placed at the feet of James’s statue. After fiddling with it and getting annoyed that the puzzle reset itself every time she made a mistake, Moira finally managed to open it.

Inside the cavernous depths of the box was a single brass key. It was thick and heavy to hold, but Moira was able to use it to open the locked door nearby. Another hallway lay before her, but at first glance this one had more furniture and display pieces, such as the massive painting hanging on the left wall.

The painting was massive enough to take up an entire wall. It depicted Prince James and Snow White clad in stately outfits as if attending a coronation or being crowned king and queen themselves, though any royal regalia they would have worn or held were missing. James had been painted standing up, while Snow White either lounged or sat in a chair. Moira had to suppress a bark of laughter over how silly James looked. The _fierce_ expression the artist gave him was entirely at odds with the overly decorated uniform he was wearing.

Snow White was a different creature altogether. This was the first time Moira had seen her depicted in art that wasn’t a wooden carving, a mannequin, or a statue. The headshot on her shrine-cottage did not count, as it was too small to pick up the finer details of her. She had brown hair and blue eyes instead of the traditional black hair fairy tales depicted her with. The artist had given her almost the same… blank stare the mannequin had, but there was a cold haughtiness in her eyes that made Moira step back and avert her eyes. Maybe all these icy motifs had some meaning to them after all.

She looked around the rest of the hallway to distract her from the portrait. The wall opposite her looked like it had another painting hanging upon it, but a thick glaze of ice covered it completely. Moira stepped forward to have a closer look. Her warm breath melted a small film of the ice, but it… regenerated? No, that couldn’t be. She tried again, exhaling forcibly and managing to melt more.

The ice regenerated right before her eyes a few seconds later.

She used the wooden box of the sewing kit to bust off a few fragments of the ice. Those fell to the floor and melted, while the broken part of the ice regenerated. She put her gloved hand on the ice. It tingled under her hand, and she quickly withdrew it before something could happen.

_So, the ice does regenerate due to a magic spell. Fire wouldn’t work against this._ Moira thought. _I’ll have to find something in here that’ll either deactivate the spell or melt the ice in a way that won’t cause it to regenerate…_

She walked past two statues and came across a solitary metal arm. It looked like it belonged to a robot or an animatronic, which almost made her kick it away. Instead she swallowed her fear, picked it up, and shoved it inside of her bag. She had _never_ come across anything in this castle that might need a metal arm, let alone robots. At least the arm looked solid enough to do some real damage if she had to fight anyone.

She turned her attention to a cluster of pictures and paintings across the hallway. These were much smaller than the massive royal portrait they were positioned next to and depicted idealistic scenes and unknown headshots of important looking people. One of them, positioned near a closed wooden door, caught her attention the most.

It was another puzzle. Four large circles, each labeled one through four in Roman numerals, took up most of the space. A piece of paper nailed to the wall below the frame had a sword and shield as number one and a rake as number two, but the rest of the paper had been torn away. When looking closer at the paper, with her free hand splayed out for balance, her fingers pushed a circle in, and it unexpectedly rotated. Moira yelped as her finger was pinched and she pulled her hand away. The initially blank circle had been replaced with a carving of a male royal’s head.

_Another rotating puzzle. Great._

Once that had been solved, a panel lifted from the frame to reveal a second puzzle.

_God damn it!_

Solving the two-part puzzle unmasked a mechanism for either an undiscovered gate or the double doors behind her. The chain inside that held two gears together had snapped a long time ago, and Moira carefully removed it. She replaced it with the chain she found in the other room. There was a space for a missing gear, and she wouldn’t be surprised if it was hidden in the flowerpot in the other room. Before going back there, she examined the finger that had gotten pinched.

The glove had saved her from cut skin – or worse, a torn fingernail – but the fabric had ripped a little along the seam. Nothing a needle and thread couldn’t fix when she got home. The pad of her finger throbbed with pain just a little; enough to be noticeable but not enough to impede her work. Moira shook her hand out and went back to the first hallway, bracing herself for either a sucker punch to the gut or a metaphorical hit with a hammer to the head.

The wave of pain that hit her gut wasn’t as intense as she feared, but it still _hurt_. She stumbled to the flowerpot and began her search. She was… slightly mor careful this time, sweeping up the discarded dirt and fallen flowers from the floor and dumping them back into the flowerpot. The item she had found eventually wasn’t the gear at all, but a chisel and hammer.

There was only one place where these could be used. Moira walked up to the block of ice on the gate and shattered it. The chisel snapped when she hit it too hard with the hammer, but she wasn’t too angry over its loss. The gate opening inward on its own snapped the rest of the ice off, and the tools faded to dust. She shook her hands to get rid of any excess invisible dust and walked forward.

&

She was back outside of the castle, though the high walls of this secret grove prevented her from seeing precisely where she was. Compared to the cold inside, being out here felt positively balmy. There was little greenery in here aside from at least two large trees that she could make out in the twilight: one of the rested next to a small artificial pond and another near a tombstone. Flower bushes had been planted near the trees, but there was barely any grass growing. Most of this ground was covered up by a large stone path snaking toward a medium-sized building on the other side of the grove. Aside from the tombstone, there were unidentifiable stone objects that _looked_ like headstones and a stone obelisk; most of them had fat, squat candles lit in front of them. The scent the nearest ones gave off was pungent and sweet.

Moira bent down in front of the tombstone and squinted to see what’d been carved onto it. She could see a _Q_, so the word carved could be “Queen”. She didn’t know who the tombstone could be for; it seemed crass to think James would have the audacity to honor Ivy in Snow White’s grove. She shook her head to banish the thought. Maybe she’d find out later. For now, she had to explore more of this area. She stood up and coughed at the candle’s scent, wandering over to the lake edge and sitting down at the base of the tree.

It wasn’t a lake view to be awed by. Broken stone columns and other assorted junk lay around her feet and floated in the water. What looked like a small fountain had toppled over into the water a long time ago… and why were there so many broken pieces of a photo frame laying around. She could understand one or two pieces, but with the ones she was picking up, she could reassemble the original with ease with the realm’s magic.

Reassembling was what she ended up doing, though the frame was more of a nameplate than a picture frame. There was writing etched into the gray-patterned marble, but it was too small for Moira to read clearly. She put it inside of her bag and walked over to the building.

Contrary to her first impression, this wasn’t a large building at all. It could easily fit inside the living room of the house she shared with her older brother and his family. A large crown had been carved over the wooden door, which had a large square cut out of its surface. There was no knob to open the door with. With nothing on hand to help her, she went back inside the castle to look for more clues.

She felt nothing upon reentry aside from reacclimating herself to the cold air, and nothing again in the hallway with the portraits. But there was something she just now noticed: the two largest portraits had nameplates. Well, the James and Snow White one did. She stepped in front of the iced over painting and looked down; its nameplate was missing and frankly, looked like it’d been ripped from the wall with great force. She placed the one she’d found by the lake into the hole left behind and pushed it inside.

The ice… mostly disappeared and did not regenerate. Behind it was a painting of a person in black. On the upper right corner was a skeleton leaning toward the painting’s subject. The skeleton’s actions and the identity of the person painted were unknown, as a large section of the canvas had been brutally cut away with a sharp instrument. The lower left corner of the painting faintly glowed a strange blue color that reminded her of the magical ice that had once shrouded it.

Nothing else happened. Moira felt like she overlooked something and went back to the grove outside. There was a thin, fragile urn placed to the right of the mysterious “Queen” tombstone that she had missed the first time around. It looked like something could be hidden inside, but there was nothing nearby to break it with. She opened her bag and pulled out the metallic arm. It was still a solid weight in her hands, but on closer inspection it was rusting badly at the joints. It could be used as a club in a pinch… and she’d _still_ found nothing here that needed a metal arm…

She gripped the wrist of the metal arm and swung downward, hard. The urn and arm broke each other upon impact, creating a cacophony of noise that made her wince. The arm pieces faded away from existence the moment they hit the ground. She bent down and picked through the shattered remains of the urn and found a ripped, dusty piece of canvas. Rubbing some of the dust away with her thumb, she found a woman’s face staring back at her.

Moira stood back up and raced back to the ripped portrait. She took out the sewing kit and carefully stitched the torn fragment back on the main canvas. She heard something underneath the portrait slide down a few seconds later, but she didn’t notice it at first as she cursed when the sewing supplies faded to dust.

_I could’ve used the leftover thread to stitch my glove up! _

She crouched down to investigate the newly revealed hidey hole. Inside was the gear she’d been looking for, as well as an old document that had been folded up. She took the gear out and stuffed it into the nearest pocket before pulling the document out and unfolding it. It was signed _Snow Queen_ and bore two red wax seals. The writing on the parchment was tiny and crabbed, but Moira could pick out the words of the document title. It read “Details pertinent to the death of the Godmother.”

Wait… _Godmother_?!

Moira fell into a sitting position, document in hand, and looked up at the portrait. The woman featured was old and holding a shiny red apple in her hands, accompanied by the skeleton Moira had seen earlier. It was leaning toward the woman, as if to mutter some juicy gossip. The woman was _far_ too old to be Snow White. And traditionally, the Snow White of the stories had been poisoned by a red apple, given to her by an old woman who was her evil _stepmother_ in disguise.

_Maybe the document meant to say stepmother instead? The woman in the portrait looks too evil to be a Godmother. Perhaps this painting is depicting the stepmother to Snow White._

As she puzzled her thoughts out, Moira put the document back into the hidey hole and took out her journal. She wrote down this new development and summarized what the document contained. Underneath her summary, she added:

_I wonder what all these ice motifs mean with Snow White. Could she be the Snow Queen too? I mean, they both have Snow in their names._

It wasn’t an audacious thought, but there wasn’t time to think about it further. Moira put her journal away and stood up, heading toward the gate mechanism. She replaced the missing gear and tried without success to use the handle on it. It wouldn’t turn or flip like a switch. As she continued to fiddle with it, she heard something fall with a thunderous crash in the other room. She abandoned the gear and raced toward the doorway.

The chandelier had fallen from the ceiling. Seeing the lit candles jolted her into moving; she ran over and extinguished them as fast as she could. Some of the candles had been snapped in half by the fall, others still smoked from extinguishing as the chandelier had fallen from the ceiling. The key was still attached, and Moira snapped the string by tugging as hard as she could and pocketing the key. When she tried to leave the room, she found that she couldn’t.

Had the falling chandelier been a ruse to lead her in here and make her find an item?

Moira went over to the flowerpot to make sure. She found a tiny book dangling on the stem of a broken flower, and she wouldn’t be surprised if it was some sort of charm to dangle off a key. She continued digging through the dirt and upturned flowers, feeling a headache developing as she did. She eventually found more pieces of a key that soon reassembled itself. She picked it up and brushed the dirt from her gloves. What would this key open, a library? A diary? Who knows? All Moira cared about was putting the key into a pocket and making her headache go away.

She wandered out into the grove and sat by the lake, breathing deep. Did she have to find another item here? She shifted her sitting position and her foot pushed a carved piece of wood into the water.

_Shit!_

Headache forgotten, Moira scrambled to fish the wood out of the lake and almost fell into the water herself getting it out. The carved wood looked like part of a square wooden frame, with what looked like part of a snowflake carved out of the middle. She found the rest of the parts easily and looked at the completed piece. It _was_ a wood frame, with a large snowflake carved out of the middle. She looked back at the building behind her, then back at the frame. The building door was missing something like this, wasn’t it?

She walked up to the wooden door and held up the frame. The wood of the frame wasn’t the same color as the wood on the door, it was a paler brownish cream compared to the homely brown. But the size of the frame compared to the cut-out surface of the door looked like they matched. Moira aligned the two together and pushed the frame in. It resisted at first, but with a few more pushes she was able to fit it inside. The door didn’t open for her, but she mostly expected that. She’d have to find the snowflake for the door to open, but where could she find something like that? The carving was large enough that any pieces that fit inside there would instantly stand out from their surroundings.

Moira turned around and searched every available nook and cranny of the grove. Finding nothing, she went back inside and did the same thing to all the available rooms she was able to enter, and still found nothing. She paused outside of the double doors at the end of the portrait hallway. The doors were cunningly carved into floral loops and swirls, with glazed glass placed behind it to prevent peeking into the room on the other side. There were no doorknobs and no visible keyhole, but she had two keys and there were no other locked doors but this one inside the castle.

She got down the floor and crawled on her hands and knees in front of the doors. Just because there wasn’t a keyhole in an obvious spot didn’t mean there was one carved somewhere else on the door. It could be closer to the ceiling, or it could be carved closer to the floor. After a few minutes of searching, she found the keyhole. It was located close to the floor, near the corner of one of the doors. An odd place to put it, that was for sure. She fished out the chandelier key and inserted it into the lock. One twist later, she heard the lock click.

The door opened inward with nary a sound. Much colder air spilled out from the room, making the skin of her face smart with pain. She dearly wished for a scarf or facial covering. Her eyes caught shades of green and pale pink, which was at odds with the freezing cold of her surroundings.

Still down on the floor, Moira crawled inside the room.


	14. Bonus Chapter II

It was cold enough to immobilize someone. Moira got to her feet and quickly looked around. The less time she spent in here, the better. The furniture and walls were in shades of pale pink by the look of things in the twilight. There was a giant window and a vanity perched close by it. In front of her was a bed with a pale blue dress spread messily over top of the covers. There was a giant portrait of Snow White hanging on the wall to the bed’s left, large enough to cover the wall it hung on. Snow White’s appearance was mostly the same as her double portrait with James, but something about canvas seemed… off. And it wasn’t the snowflake half sticking to Snow White’s throat, either.

She had to stand on top of a couch to grab the snowflake, but she still wasn’t tall enough to grasp it completely. Moira yanked hard on the part she was able to grab, and staggered and flailed a bit as the snowflake wrenched free from the canvas. She jumped from the couch, tiny objects on a chest of drawers rattled from the force of her landing and shoved the object into her bag.

Shivering violently, she went to the bed. There was nothing on here she could throw on in terms of extra layers, everything was made of silk or some other kind of cloth material more appropriate for summer. The dress on the bed was a much dark blue than she expected. There were several objects scattered around it: a fan, many kinds of gems and brooches… some of them looked familiar. Moira took the snowflake half out and looked at it while dancing in place. Same sapphire and diamond gems, same silver filigree… she grabbed the fallen pieces as she saw them, and soon had the second snowflake half.

She knew this snowflake went onto the door to the building in the grove. But she saw a snowflake image on the carpet by the bed and knelt to investigate it. It was small—too small to fit the snowflake in her hands. The image was probably just a decoration, but the rounded circle in the middle aroused her suspicions. She wouldn’t have to summon anything, would she? She hoped not.

She ran out of the bedroom and toward the grove, trying to keep her blood pumping throughout her body. Any longer in that bedroom and she was sure she was going to become a popsicle.

The snowflake halves made a very pretty sight when fused together inside the wooden frame on the door outside. If it wasn’t made of diamonds and sapphires, it’d make a fantastic piece of stained glass. The door opened after the snowflake was put in, but it didn’t open very far. Moira sketched the snowflake out in her journal, making notes of what colors went where, and then she put it away to look inside the building.

Unfortunately, the building was nothing more than a storage shed. The only object of note was a metal stand made of iron that stood as tall as her shoulder. A snowflake had been embossed upon it. As Moira grabbed it to get a closer look at the snowflake, she heard something fall into the lake. It wasn’t a very large splash, but the sound carried because of how quiet it was. She pulled the stand toward her and hefted it slightly so she could carry it properly and went over to the lake.

It was almost impossible to figure out what fell into the water, there was so much junk and debris floating in the water and washed up upon the shoreline. Moira set the stand down and went down to the water’s edge. She started grabbing anything she could get her hands on, trying to avoid getting into the water, and formed piles of odds and ends that looked like they belonged together. By the time she presumably found the item that fell into the lake, she had a huge pile of junk around her.

All of _that_. For a basic heart-shaped locket.

Moira put the locket into a pocket with a huff and started throwing the junk pile back into the water by the armfuls. She only stopped to look at the locket when every piece of junk was gone. The locket comprised of a giant red gem cut into the shape of a heart, surrounded by gold, and stringed with a red ribbon. Where would she use this? What did it unlock?

She turned her attention to the stand next. The snowflake embossed upon it resembled the snowflake image in Snow White’s bedroom, though the one on the carpet was much larger. The hole in the middle of that was probably meant for the stand. The top of the stand was flat, although there was a slit in the middle that looked like it could hold a piece of something thin.

_I **really** hope I don’t have to summon anything with that,_ she thought to herself.

She walked back into the castle and hissed with pain upon entering the portrait hallway. She braced herself when entering the bedroom but couldn’t suppress a small groan. There was an item on the damn bed, she knew that, but she wanted to get rid of the locket first. She staggered over to Snow White’s portrait first and found nothing that required a heart-shaped anything. She went over to the vanity next. There was a large jewelry box with an indent in the lid. Heart-shaped? Hard to tell in the dimness of the room.

The pain was overwhelming, trailing down from her abdomen to her legs. Moira gritted her teeth as she fumbled for the locket, picking it up and slamming it down into the indent. Her cold fingers ached from the impact as she opened the jewelry box. Inside was a locked, leather bound book. _DIARY_ had been etched into the cover. She clumsily took the book key out and stuck it into the lock.

Three diary pages were loose, though it was hard to tell if they’d been ripped out. A large, pale blue gem-like shard that gleamed brightly in the dim room was tucked into the pages. Moira reached for the shard but reconsidered. The edges were sharp, and she could cut herself. She looked around the room for something to grab it with and settled for a handkerchief laying on the bed. When the tip of the embroidered cloth touched the shard, however, it began to freeze over.

Moira yelled in shock, dropped the now frozen cloth like she’d been burned. She looked at her glove. None of the ice had spread to the leather, thankfully. The handkerchief fell from the jewelry box and shattered on the floor, spreading tiny pieces of ice everywhere. What _was_ that shard? Was it the cause of this bone-chilling cold in this room?

She turned her attention to the diary pages next, ignoring the stabbing pain in her gut. She couldn’t read the words Snow White had written, but she discovered a letter Snow White had written to her husband that she _could_ read. She was… leaving him? For what or why, the letter said nothing.

_So, I was right. Snow White is alive. Why would she leave James? What caused their marriage to break down? Could that tombstone in the grove symbolize their broken marriage, of how Snow White was no longer James’s queen?_

Moira wrote down the letter in the journal and finally went over to the bed. There were more scattered items on here than she initially thought, and soon assembled a pair of iron tongs with a matching leather bag. The pain aching her went away that same instant. Heaving a sigh of relief but still shivering, she went back to the vanity and used the tongs to pick up the shard. The ice began to spread, but it was a slower creep up the iron. Moira judged she could hold these tongs for maybe five minutes before the ice reached her fingers.

On closer inspection, the shard wasn’t a gem like she thought. She could see her face reflected in it. Was this part of a mirror? There weren’t any broken mirrors in this area of the castle. Maybe Snow White had placed it in the diary to prevent any prying eyes. Still holding the tongs, Moira set the stand down on top of the snowflake image. Nothing grand happened until she decided to put the shard into the slot. Out of the corner of her eye, something _moved_.

Moira turned around to look at Snow White’s portrait.

The young woman wrapped in a yellow shawl… morphed. Her brown hair became long and black, her dress changed into black robes that were held shut by a snowflake brooch. A high collar of white fur resembled icicles formed behind and around her neck. The colors of the painting’s background darkened and rotted.

_SHE’S THE FUCKING SNOW QUEEN—HOLY SHIT—_

Once her mind recovered from the shock and she wrote in her journal, something didn’t seem to add up. Marie had said she saw a woman with _white_ hair and clothes with ice powers, but the portrait here had dark clothing and black hair. Was this what Snow White used to look like and then changed her wardrobe to all white? Moira could barely fathom it but decided to accept it anyway. She noticed something else then, a rolled-up piece of parchment sticking out from a lower corner of the canvas. Moira reached for it, but she had a feeling of dread wash over her and stopped. Something bad might happen if she grabbed it.

She looked near the portrait and got an idea. She moved a tiny end table with a potted plant on top of it aside and stood in its place. Using the tongs, she clamped down on the note and pulled.

A sudden blast of magic escaped the portrait. Moira yelped and dropped the tongs just as a sheet of ice covered the area in front of the portrait. The tongs were caught in the crossfire, frozen to the carpet, but the note wasn’t clamped in it. She looked around and soon found it sitting harmlessly on the couch – what was left of it, anyway. She picked the note up and unrolled it.

It was a map, but it was depicting a castle she had never seen before. The only words she could make out were _Snowfall Kingdom_. The papers thrummed with magic power, tingling her hands and warming them up. Was this where Snow White lived? Why would she hide a map of her home in her portrait?

_Whatever. I have everything I need. I found out everything I needed to on Snow White._

Moira rolled the map back up and walked over to the bedroom door after stowing the map in a pocket. She attempted to leave but couldn’t.

_Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I must get out of here, it’s even colder than before and I’m going to fucking freeze to death. What the fuck does the bed have this time?_

She went back to the bed. The blankets and side table were coated with a thin sheen of ice, but she could still move things around. She eventually assembled a large, bulky compass with a snowflake insignia on the inside lid. It was a heavy weight in her hand, and it felt like carrying a large stone when she put it in a pocket. It bounced painfully against her hip as she finally left the bedroom.

She suppressed a gasp of shock as she entered the hallway. The ice wasn’t limited to the bedroom; it made a slippery path down the hallway like an icy snake and came to a stop at the stepmother’s portrait. A thick glaze of ice covered the canvas again, and the wall underneath the nameplate had been smashed open and frozen over. Something long and thing glittered under the ice, but she had no way to retrieve it.

Moira left the hallway, waddling between the icy path to avoid walking on it and shaking violently with cold. The icy path continued into the next room, covering the chandelier and forging two paths: one that led outside and another that stopped at the now frozen flowerpot. She stopped there first, hoping to find an item, and pieced together a sharpened pickaxe. With that in hand, she went back outside.

Snowflakes were falling from the sky, and there was an immense magical pressure that seemed to weight her down. Moira craned up her head up and saw the source.

A fucking _portal_. The snowflakes were spilling out of its swirling, blackened depths. It seemed to beckon her forward with an invisible finger, but Moira bared her teeth at it and turned away. There was no way in hell she was going through there. She went over to the lake to get away from it. While there, she found and lit a discarded torch. Sneaking away from the portal, she went back inside.

The hot torch gave off a strong heat, warming the cold skin of her face slightly. Moira initially used the flames to try and melt the icy path on the floor, but the ice wouldn’t melt. She tried it on the ice on the wall and had better success: she found a tall magic wand, but the torch’s fire flickered out. She tossed the now dead torch aside and picked up the wand. Like the map in her pocket, the wand thrummed with immense power. Could she make the portal go away with this?

She went back outside and aimed the wand at the portal.

“Come on, doing some magic,” she told the wand. She waved the wand a bit.

That seemed to ignite _something_, but it had the opposite effect of what Moira wanted. Motes of magic were leaving the wand and shooting toward the portal. She tried to wrench the wand away, but the magical connection between the two was too strong, and she could do nothing as the wand was drained of its magic and became nothing more than a withered stick that crumbled to dust. Nothing was happened to the portal yet. She hefted her pickaxe.

A mere pickaxe couldn’t destroy a portal, but it could destroy something else. The stone obelisk next to the portal looked like it was supporting it, and Moira smashed the ice covering it. Ice and stone fragments exploded everywhere, but the portal stayed put. Underneath the debris was a bowl, with a space etched inside for… it looked like the compass. The snowflake insignias were identical. Moira dug the compass out and stuck it inside.

_Now_ the portal changed. The black swirling depths morphed right before her eyes, and the image of a large white castle appeared. The amount of snowflakes being vomited out seemed to increase tenfold, and Moira shook her hair out. The pressure from the portal seemed to be increasing as well, smothering her senses and weighing her shoulders down. She heaved a huge lungful of air and considered her choices: run or jump into the portal.

She ran.

Moira ran out of the grove, out of Ivy’s tomb, and did not stop running until she was near the castle armory. Had she jumped into that portal, there would’ve been no way back. She wouldn’t have been able to get Marie and her bodyguard out of here. She wouldn’t be able to see her family again. The agency would mark her as missing in action, and that was a fate no member of the agency wanted to experience.

She sat-slid down the wall she was resting against and pulled out the map. The pages showed the inside of a castle, but they were blank. This was _just_ like the map she had of this kingdom, but the magic was much stronger and not on its last legs. This would be—useful. Very useful.

_Once I catch my breath, I need to get out of here with Marie and her bodyguard. And the piglet._ Moira thought. _I just… hope we don’t run into any snags on the way out._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember kids: always say no to portals unless you have a guaranteed method of escape.


	15. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is! The last chapter. I tried to follow what I wanted to include (and BS'd quite a few things, like how Moira, Marie, and her bodyguard got back), but a few things did not make it and will make up the bulk of the prologue to my Rise of the Snow Queen novelization... when I eventually get to it. I will probably write out novelizations of the first three Ravenhearst games first, to flesh out the references mentioned in both here and in A Thorny Reprieve, but time will tell.
> 
> Anyway, a big thank you to readers and those who have commented or left kudos on the chapters. I appreciate you all!

“Here piggy-piggy… here piggy-piggy…”

No response. Moira rounded a corner and entered the kitchen. The silver tray had fallen to the ground from the countertop and the piglet was nowhere in sight.

“I guess James’s death must have released it…” she wondered out loud.

If the piglet really was gone, then she should not waste time looking for it. She needed to get Marie and her bodyguard out of here. She turned around and walked back to the cottage, where she found them both sitting on the floor looking at something.

“My phone…” Marie whispered.

Moira knelt next to her and peered down. The smartphone had been destroyed beyond recognition, almost snapped in half with its screen smashed. Marie must have lost it while fighting back against James, and it was probably busted up during the fight if it had fallen to the floor. The pieces—what could be found, at least—were laying on top of what may have been a shirt that had been ripped up.

“We better take it with us anyway,” Moira stated. She helped Marie tie up the cloth tightly and stow them away. “Are you ready to go?”

Marie and her bodyguard both nodded. The trio went downstairs and walked out onto the porch, where Marie picked up her discarded shoe. There was no one outside, though Moira thought she saw movement in the forest beyond. She led them through the gate and up the path to the large, rotting tree cautiously, making hushed and idle conversation as they went. She learned that the bodyguard’s name was Johannes, and that it had been Marie’s idea to take a walk here.

“I think I passed a car when I was hiking here. Was it yours?” Moira asked Johannes. He nodded.

“I drove Marie here. I hope it hasn’t been removed…” he replied grimly.

“My book!” Marie burst out excitedly.

Before Moira could stop her, Marie dashed ahead towards the tree and grabbed her book. A man stumbled out onto the path moments later, followed by two women and a child. All four looked like farmers, and the disoriented looks on their faces told Moira that they had once been under James’s spell. They crowded around Marie, who tried to back away but found herself blocked by the tree.

“Wo sind… wir?” the man asked her. His words were slurred. “Wer… bist du?”

Johannes ran forward and pushed the group aside, pulling a startled Marie back behind him. He began talking to the group in hushed tones while Marie shuffled back to Moira’s side.

“Are you all right?” she asked. Marie nodded, though she sniffled a bit.

The two of them listened to Johannes talk for what felt like an hour. The conversation occasionally grew heated as if the family did not believe him, and Moira could hear him repeat certain phrases multiple times. Finally, he broke away from the family, who walked past them and toward the cottage.

“Did you manage to convince them?” Marie asked.

“I hope.” Johannes replied tersely.

They ran into two more groups before reaching the log that marked the boundary between this realm and the modern world. One was a crowd that took both Johannes and Marie to explain things, and another was a trio of travelers. All had been dressed from different time periods, from at least fifteenth century to the nineteen-forties. By the time the second group had dispersed, Moira was getting anxious to leave.

“Do you think that’s the last of them?” she asked.

“I think. Maybe the ones we talked to will convince the others.” Marie replied tiredly. “I hope everyone finds their way to the castle…”

“All right. We’re at the boundary that’ll lead us back to our world. Are you ready?” Moira asked.

Marie and Johannes nodded, and Moira offered her hands. Once both had grasped them, only then did she walk forward. Marie audibly gasped at the sensation but did not let go. It was still nightfall, and Moira didn’t see any search parties or individuals lurking around. She looked at Johannes.

“Provided your car is still here, will you be able to drive us without any trouble?” she inquired. Marie yawned hugely and leaned against her shoulder, clutching her possessions for dear life. Moira put an arm around her shoulder to support her. “I have a hotel room in the village nearby, but I know Marie wants to go home.”

“I don’t doubt the car I used will be noted as missing… but come with us to the Chancellor’s residence,” Johannes replied. “I’m sure the Chancellor will arrange for someone to drive you back here. But…”

“I don’t think either of us want to be seen in these clothes in public,” Marie quipped. “I don’t want to walk through a hotel looking like this.”

Moira looked at her, then back at Johannes. They were still wearing the outlandish clothes she had foisted upon them back in James’s cottage.

“…Yes. The less fodder the trash magazines have, the better.”

&

Marie’s reunion with her parents was just as joyous and heartfelt Moira imagined it’d be. They had not asked about the state of her clothes, but she and Johannes had been whisked away to get cleaned up afterward while Moira had introduced herself and followed the Chancellor to what seemed to be a private office.

“I received a call from the German branch of your agency the night my Marie went missing,” they explained. “Irma Seibert told me her kidnapping by the Frog Prince was… a possibility, given where she and her bodyguard disappeared from. Did the director send you to rescue Marie?”

Moira could only nod and sag a little into the armchair she sat in. She was so tired, but she had a lot to do before even considering going to bed.

“I am actually a member of the Edinburgh branch of the agency. I assume my supervisor and Ms. Seibert worked together to send me to the Black Forest, given that I had discovered evidence about the Frog Prince on another case.” she explained. She stretched her back and shoulders, hearing an audible _crack_ as her joints popped. “Your Excellency… how are you going to break this story to the press? You’re aware that the work we do at the agency is… clandestine.”

The word hung in the air for a long time. Moira pinched her thigh to stay awake.

“Did anyone see you leave the forest?” the Chancellor asked abruptly. Moira shook her head.

“Johannes drove Marie and I straight here after we left the forest. No one saw us leave.”

The Chancellor nodded slowly. Moira felt like she could see the gears turning in their head as they formulated a response. They tapped a pen against the wood of their desk absently.

“I think I have the story to break to the press,” they announced some time later. “Your role will not be mentioned in order to protect your privacy and that of the agency’s…”

Not getting public recognition for her work stung—it always did—but it was necessary. At least the agency, and those it worked with, would recognize it.

The Chancellor was still talking. Moira pulled her mind away from her current train of thought and listened.

“…drive you back to your hotel.”

“Beg pardon?” she asked.

“I thank you for the work you’ve done to save my daughter, and I will have someone drive you back to your hotel.” the Chancellor repeated.

“Your welcome, Your Excellency, and thank you very much,” Moira replied.

A brief silence followed, which seemed to signal the end of the meeting. Moira shook hands with the Chancellor and was escorted out. After exchanging quick farewells with Marie, she was escorted to a waiting car and taken back to her hotel. After leaving a quick voicemail to Anne, only saying that the case was closed and Marie was safe, she went straight to bed.

&

Her cell phone was buzzing incessantly. Moira reached under her pillow and looked at the screen while rubbing her eyes.

A missed call from Anne. Multiple texts in the family group chat. Two separate texts from her older brother Andrew. Moira opened that one first: he hoped her “trip” was going well, and that her rent to him was due when she returned. The second text was an addendum to the first one sent: he didn’t expect her to pay until she was back home, and they could talk about it then.

_I thought I paid him before I left…_ Moira thought groggily. She sat up in bed and opened the family group chat.

Birthday wishes from her siblings to… not her. She blinked at the bright screen sleepily and then checked the date.

_Oh. Mum’s birthday._

At least three more texts were sent to the group, all of them probably from her oldest nephews and niece, before she finally sent hers.

_Happy bday mum. On holiday. Will pick up gift b4 I leave._

Another text popped up from Catherine. Of course, her oldest sister was asking where she was. Moira texted _Germany_ and closed out of the chat. Her phone buzzed with more messages as she called Anne.

“The case is solved?” she inquired crisply.

“Yes.”

“Grab a pen and paper. I’m going to give you the number to Irma Seibert, who my counterpart in the German branch.” Anne said.

Moira climbed out of bed and retrieved her battered journal and pen. Irma… Irma… the Chancellor had mentioned her last night? Yes, they had. God, she needed to wake up.

“Anne? I’m ready.”

Anne rattled off a phone number and extension. Moira wrote slowly, repeating the numbers back as necessary so she didn’t miss anything. After reminding Moira to submit her case report and journal the week after returning to the agency, Anne hung up. Moira dressed quickly and dialed the number she had been given. After spending fifteen minutes verifying her identity and agency credentials, she was finally able to schedule a meeting with Irma and the department that handled the Frog Prince case.

“Thank _fuck_ that’s over,” she said wearily.

Her stomach growled loudly in protest. With the time Irma had given her for the meeting, she barely had enough time to eat, let alone gather up and organize all the evidence and papers she’d found in James’s castle.

_Food. I need food first._

&

The scanner whined and beeped loudly as the separate pages of the map were scanned in rapid succession. Moira clutched the arm rests of her chair tightly as she looked up at the giant screen showing the scanning results. One map page. Blank. Then it blinked, and the page changed to the layout of the forest. She let out a sigh of relief as the rest of the pages loaded perfectly. The magic really had been used up from the map pages, making it possible to scan in without frying the computer or the scanner attached to it.

“Thank you for these documents,” Irma gushed. Moira could see tears welling up and hastily offered her a tissue from a pack in her pocket. “I never thought we’d—these will be invaluable to us.”

“I know the documents can’t replace what you lost, but I hope they can help you with continuing your research on Ja—the Frog Prince,” Moira replied as Irma dabbed her eyes. She handed her another tissue. “I want you to keep them as well. The Edinburgh branch doesn’t have a need for them as much as you do.”

“But we don’t want you go back empty-handed!” the employee who handled the scanner burst out. Moira thought his name was either Hans. Or Mark. “We can send you the scans.”

“Scans would be invaluable,” Anne’s voice chimed in from the speaker of a phone they had set up for this meeting. “But I do agree with Miss Moira, the originals should remain in Germany.”

Moira listened to Irma reply but didn’t tune in. She took a sip of water from the cup in front of her. She’d been here for… going on four hours. She had recounted what she’d found out about James and his castle in an interview with Irma, with Anne joining in via a conference call on a secure line. She had to talk about killing James, which left a bad taste in her mouth. She also discussed all of James’s wives and Marie’s rescue, but stopped short of revealing that Snow White was the Snow Queen. It didn’t feel like it fit into the narrative, although she had mentioned that Snow White had left James and was still alive.

“…finished here?” Anne asked. Moira yanked her mind back to the present, and an idea struck her.

“Wait!” she exclaimed.

“…Yes?” Irma and Anne asked simultaneously.

“James—the Frog Prince—he had his five wives,” she began. “If we continue to receive cases, we might find out more about them. Anne, I know this is going to be outlandish, but when I get back, I want to start making a family tree. Or at least some kind of… information based… thing.”

Silence.

“I… think that’s a good idea,” Anne replied hesitantly. “Irma and her colleagues could benefit from it as well, if you’re able to digitize it and make it shareable.”

“Anne, I’m really not sure how I’m going to go about this yet,” Moira admitted. “Could I… rent one of the conference rooms? Preferably the ones with the large, wheeled bulletin boards? I don’t think my desk is going to be large enough.”

“Those are reserved for meetings, not… whatever you’re planning. However, they’re very rarely used, and our building has far too many of them,” Anne replied with a sigh. “But I will ask the Director nonetheless. In the meantime, try to start small, such as making a scrapbook. If it starts getting larger than that, then we could look into the possibility of the conference room.”

“I can… try,” Moira replied.

“Good,” Anne replied. Everyone heard a pinging noise in the background and Anne’s subsequent soft cursing. “I need to leave for another meeting. Irma, thank you for inviting me to participate in this call. Miss Moira, I will see you when you return.”

The line went dead as Anne disconnected. Mark—or was his name Hans?—turned toward Moira.

“So about setting up that information about the Frog Prince’s family…”

Moira drained her glass of water. This new meeting might take a while.

&

_Two weeks later_

Moira eased her way into Anne’s office, closing the door quietly behind her. Anne was typing something furiously fast into her computer, with Moira’s case report and journal sitting near her keyboard.

“Come sit down, Moira,” Anne stated without looking away from her screen. She sounded cross. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Moira sat down, her heart beginning to pound. Her report hadn’t been _that_ badly written right? True, some parts had been hastily written and others had been written during more than one all-nighter, but she’d tried her hardest to make the report complete and coherent. She looked at Anne. Her supervisor’s mouth had tightened into a thin line, and she slammed the Enter key on her keyboard with an air of finality before turning to face her. Her cross look eased a little.

“I only have a few questions about your report. There’s no need to look frightened.”

That did not ease Moira’s concerns one bit. Nonetheless, she scooted her chair closer. Anne handed her back her journal. There was a large post-it sticking out in the middle of it, and Moira opened it hesitantly. It was the page entry where she’d tried explaining James’s morphing curses after waking up from Princess Ivy’s blast of magic. Her handwriting was sloppy and hard to read even with a clear head. She gazed up at Anne with lowered eyelashes, trying to not look embarrassed.

“I want to assure you that I was not drunk when I wrote this entry. At the time of writing, I had just woken up from having a spell cast at my face.”

“Can you explain what you wrote down? Not even our best handwriting analysists and transcribers could decipher your writing, and it’s normally much neater.”

Moira nodded despite her misgivings. She talked about the events leading up to the spell, what happened when the spell hit her, and the aftermath of writing the journal entry. Anne slowly nodded in understanding throughout the narrative, though she still looked puzzled.

“Why would Princess Ivy use magic on you?” she inquired.

“She was a ghost, and… I guess that was the only way she could tell her and Prince James’s story. And she had a lot to tell,” Moira replied. “I know I recorded some of my interactions with her. Did you review my tape recorder?”

“Yes. Unfortunately, despite our best effort, we were unable to hear anything on the tape except for my message, dead static—which was probably Princess Ivy speaking—and your responses to what Princess Ivy was saying.”

Moira let out a disappointed sigh.

“What about the scrap of paper about Briar Rose?” she asked. She hated how petulant she sounded. “Do you believe my theory that she and Princess Ivy are sisters?”

“In the face of what you provided, and what the other agents learned in the aftermath of Briar Rose’s case… yes, I am inclined to believe you now,” Anne started. She stood up and walked away from her desk to look out of the window. “But about that tape recorder. Have you noticed how modern technology that relies on the Internet tends to get… fried when used in areas of high concentrations of magic?”

“It’s a phenomenon I’m aware of but have never witnessed in person,” Moira replied with a shrug. “I’ve always left my cell phone behind when going into the fairy tale realms. I mean… I’m going to be utterly alone in a different world. I can’t call for backup in that case.”

“That is why we give you those old tape recorders before a case. They do not need to be charged up, and they’re virtually indestructible unless you throw them off a cliff,” Anne explained. “If you’d taken your phone there… well, there’s a high chance it’ll be fried or explode. I highly doubt you can afford to lose that, so please continue your current practice of leaving it behind.”

Moira cringed at the thought of losing her phone. All her saved contacts, her texts with her family, all her _photos_… she couldn’t afford to lose it all.

“Before I let you go… there’s something I want to ask. It’s about Snow White.”

Moira opened her eyes. Anne had returned to her desk and was looking at her sharply.

“…Yes, Anne?”

“Were you telling the full story about Snow White during the meeting with Irma? Beyond her leaving Prince James? Your journal had several ripped pages at the end.”

“…No. There’s more to the story, but I didn’t think it was relevant to the story about Prince James,” Moira admitted shamefully.

“Miss Moira, you have a duty to report every detail about your case, no matter how trivial,” Anne scolded. “We do _not_ tolerate information being concealed or destroyed. I thought Sterling and your mentor Barker taught you better than that in the Paranormal division.”

“I-I’m sorry!” Moira stammered. “I-I still have the original pages. Snow White is the Snow Queen—”

“_What did you say?!_” Anne interrupted with a shout. Moira cowered.

“Snow White is the Snow Queen,” she repeated. “Anne—”

“Did you uncover any other information when you discovered that?”

“A map! But Anne—”

“Where is the map!?”

“I put it in storage!” Moira shouted back.

Anne stood up from her desk and ran out of her office, shouting for—someone. Moira stood up and tried to follow, but lost sight of her supervisor at the end of the hallway. She clutched a stitch in her side as she tried to get her breath back.

“Anne?! Anne? Oh, _fuck_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of notes:
> 
> \- The German roughly translates to "Where are we?" and "Who are you?". If I made any mistakes, please correct me and I will fix it!  
\- The Chancellor is normally officially addressed as "His Excellency" or "Her Excellency", but given that I want to keep things vague, I went with "Your Excellency" as a gender-neutral alternative.  
\- Sterling is a character that has not been introduced yet; he was Moira's supervisor in the Paranormal division and functions similarly to Anne.  
\- Barker is a one-note character who hails from the fourth Ravenhearst game, though *I* will be putting him in the background of the first three games because I can and my narrative requires it.


End file.
